Objective: Empower patients with exercise-focused motivational frameworks and personalized tracking for real-time health insights, while reducing clinician burden through continuous monitoring and targeted health coaching—all without compromising the quality of patient care.

Background: Triaging specialist time is a major challenge in Parkinson’s care—ensuring urgent needs are met while optimizing specialist capacity [1]. Our program addresses this by identifying patient risk proactively, promoting preventative exercising and enhancing adherence through patient-driven tracking tools and ongoing coaching — strategies shown to reduce falls and enhance patient resilience.

Method: A total of 250 Parkinson’s patients with moderate disease severity (H&Y stage 2 & 3) and responsiveness to Levodopa participated in this pilot. Participants used a wearable device linked to a mobile app that tracked symptoms, provided medication reminders, educational content, and enabled reporting of clinician-identified high-risk symptoms such as falls, abrupt mobility declines, or hallucinations. Regular coaching supported effective app use and symptom reporting. Automated AI-generated summaries integrating passive and active data were prepared before visits to enhance communication with Movement Disorder Specialists.

Results: After enrollment, patients increased their exercise, as confirmed by self-reports and wearable data. Engagement was robust, with participants interacting with the app at least weekly and generating over nine hours of passive data daily. Although all patients had moderate disease severity, notable variability was observed in high-risk symptoms and passively monitored metrics such as mobility, tremor, and dyskinesia. Most patients reported that personalized reports and educational content enhanced confidence in disease management, improved the quality of their care, and fostered more productive communication with clinicians during visits.

Conclusion: This program shows promise in easing specialists’ workload by enabling early symptom detection, prompt care adjustments, and reduced hospitalizations.

References: [1] Pearson, C., Hartzman, A., Munevar, D., Feeney, M., Dolhun, R., Todaro, V., Rosenfeld, S., Willis, A., & Beck, J. C. (2023). Care access and utilization among medicare beneficiaries living with Parkinson’s disease. NPJ Parkinson’s Disease, 9(1), 108.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/mitigating-risk-and-expanding-movement-disorder-specialist-capacity-advancing-parkinsons-disease-management-with-integrated-monitoring-targeted-triage-and-improved-patient-clinician-communi/