Identifying Early Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Using Health Administrative Data

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) affects the airways that causes shortness of breath, cough. COPD gets worse over time, and often leads to emergency department visits, hospital visits, frequent doctor appointments and medications. This means COPD is expensive, and severely impacts patient quality of life. Unfortunately, patients are often not properly diagnosed until their disease is fairly advanced. We know a lot about the health care use of people with COPD once they have been diagnosed, but we do not know much about what happens to them leading up to their diagnosis. Through this project we want to better understand the time period prior to COPD diagnosis, so that we can learn more about what happens to people before they are diagnosed. This project will use health data to find out if we can identify trends in health care use by individuals newly diagnosed with COPD. We will identify people that have COPD based on health records, and look back to find out about their health care use prior to their diagnosis. We will look at data related to doctors' visits, emergency department visits, hospital stays and medications. We want to use these markers to better understand what happens to people before they are diagnosed, and to find out if we can identify risk factors for a COPD diagnosis. We hope by doing this research we can better identify people at risk for COPD and ensure that they receive treatment early, which may improve their health outcomes.