Extending the Respiratory Therapist Beyond the Bedside

Respiratory therapists know their patients’ therapies better than almost anyone on the care team. They set up the oxygen, fit the CPAP, teach the inhaler technique and watch how the patient responds. Then the patient goes home, and that expertise usually stops at the door.

At EBM Health Care Strategies, we think the respiratory therapist’s role should follow the patient. Remote care makes that possible without adding a second job on top of the first.

The five questions RTs already ask

Every good respiratory assessment comes back to the same set of questions:

• Is the therapy being used?
• Is it working?
• Can it be adjusted?
• Are there adjunctive options?
• What else can the patient do?

At the bedside, a therapist can answer these by watching and asking. After discharge, the answers usually come only at the next visit, if they come at all. A clinician sees a chronic patient for a few minutes a year, and between visits nothing reports back. The questions remain; the evidence disappears.

What the RT sees between visits

CareConnect™ gives the respiratory therapist daily evidence from the patient. The care team customizes the questions through PDS™ (Patient Data System), using a Practice-Based Protocol approach. A question set might ask about therapy use, breathlessness on a scale, weight or activity. The patient answers on the phone they already carry, in large type and one question at a time, in about thirty seconds a day.

On the RT’s side, answers arrive on the dashboard in real time, attributed to the right patient. Readings outside the patient’s care plan raise an alert the same day. Fourteen-day trends show whether things are improving, holding or drifting, which a single reading cannot.

That is the information needed to answer the five questions continuously rather than once or twice a year. It also lets the prescriber measure the outcome of a medication, therapy or device with evidence, and optimize it.

Hybrid Overnight Oximetry in the RT’s hands

For cardio-pulmonary patients, respiratory therapists can also work with Hybrid Overnight Oximetry, a Practice-Based Protocol approach that runs from screening through management of therapeutics such as CPAP and oxygen therapy. It brings the RT’s expertise to the questions of who may need therapy and whether an existing therapy is doing its job. We explain the protocol in more detail in Hybrid Overnight Oximetry: A Practice-Based Protocol for Cardio-Pulmonary Care.

Built for how RTs work

The platform for Health Care Professionals brings the pieces of remote respiratory work together in one place:

• Daily patient data collection
• Patient communication through a single channel
• Care team coordination with physicians and other team members
• Hybrid Oximetry workflows
• Time tracking, captured automatically as the RT reviews and acts
• Billing documentation

Physicians stay in control of their patients’ care. The RT handles the between-visit workload, escalates what needs attention and documents everything. Communication runs through one channel between the patient and everyone on their care team, built for collaboration rather than as another inbox.

Why it matters to the department and the hospital

It also changes the conversation between the RT and the physician. Instead of reporting an impression from the last encounter, the therapist can point to what the patient has reported every day for the past two weeks and bring a specific, documented question to the prescriber: keep the plan, adjust it, or add something.

For the respiratory department, extending the RT beyond the bedside turns an episodic service into a continuous one. For the hospital, it puts experienced clinicians on the period after discharge, when respiratory patients are most likely to struggle and when readmissions for conditions such as COPD and pneumonia are measured by CMS.

The model is designed to start without hiring, equipment purchases or an IT build. No CPT codes are required, there is no payer qualification and there are no limits on who can take part. The program aims to add new revenue, reduce 30-day readmissions and produce continuous data that supports quality reporting; results depend on the population and how the program is run.

Remote work also opens new roles for therapists. We look at that in Remote Roles for Respiratory Therapists.