To increase the likelihood that patients with COPD will engage in self-management interventions to improve their health, strategy personalization is imperative, advises an editorial in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

“As COPD is a heterogeneous disease, not all intrapulmonary and extrapulmonary components characterizing COPD are present in everyone at any given time. There is a diversity in individual patient needs, and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for COPD care and management,” wrote Anke Lenferink, PhD, and coauthors.

The authors outlined four important components of effective COPD self-management: a patient-tailored approach, adherence, digital technology, and implementation.

Patient-tailored interventions for self-management should consider individual characteristics, symptoms, and comorbidities, the authors explained. This requires monitoring patients over time for treatable traits.

“Another aspect that can severely complicate disease management is multimorbidity in COPD due to shared risk factors (eg, smoking, inactivity), overlapping symptoms (eg, acute dyspnea), and comorbidities (eg, feelings of anxiety), triggering COPD exacerbations,” the authors wrote.

Educating patients on multimorbid disease patterns could improve awareness. Ongoing feedback on disease patterns could also boost adherence and improve outcomes. The editorial cites research showing less than half of patients with COPD adhere to self-management interventions and other therapies. Tailoring interventions to overcome adherence barriers, and to include factors that facilitate adherence, aids motivation. The increasing use of digital interventions for patient education, remote monitoring, communication, and self-treatment can be a source of patient empowerment and adherence as well.

“Digital COPD applications have the potential to provide better insights into the daily life of an individual patient by using real-time data that can be used for individual risk and benefit profiling,” the authors wrote, “and guide decision-making to provide appropriate personalized care and support.”

Making sure such interventions add value to patient care before implementation is important, as is ensuring both patients and professionals are trained and prepared for patients to take a more active role in management.

“To achieve this, self-management interventions should be tailored to individual patients’ needs, health beliefs, capabilities, skills, and literacy levels,” the authors wrote, “and, in addition, be accessible, inclusive, and safe to use.”