This COPD Awareness Month, learn how Parachute Health can help

November is COPD Awareness Month, and Parachute Health is proud to be enabling clinicians and suppliers as they connect patients to lifesaving respiratory care. 

COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) takes an estimated 150,000 lives annually in the United States and over 3 million worldwide, and with complications from long COVID and post-COVID lung damage on the rise, that number is expected to increase. Currently, about 15 million adults in the United States have COPD, with an estimated 12 million more pending diagnosis or unaware that they have the disease. 

In COPD, the lungs become blocked and lose their ability to provide the body with adequate oxygen, causing coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, fatigue, confusion, and agitation. If oxygen deprivation becomes severe enough, severe complications and total respiratory failure can occur, leading to death. As a result, people with COPD rely on life-sustaining equipment and supplies such as supplemental oxygen therapy, nebulized medications, bilevel support, home ventilation, and other key respiratory care equipment and supplies. 

But respiratory care ordering is a notoriously complicated area of health care, with wildly different standards of documentation and coding by payor, diagnosis, and patient status. It's even more complicated for COPD patients, because COPD is a chronic condition requiring regular reorders, with each reorder triggering the same complicated paperwork demands. 

As a result, traditional ordering methods for COPD equipment are rife with delays, with most orders arriving days or even weeks after they’re needed, and many orders never arriving at all. For patients who are struggling to get enough air, the common scenario of orders getting lost somewhere in the byzantine maze of information and documentation demands doesn’t just prolong suffering — it can be downright deadly. 

Parachute Health allows suppliers to offer all of these equipment types and more with our easy-to-use online ordering platform. We're not suppliers or clinicians, but we provide suppliers and clinicians with a unified platform for every step of the ordering process. This includes everything from built-in checks of covered diagnosis codes for prescribed equipment to providing updates of successful delivery and direct messaging to resolve questions. 

For example, one major DME supplier in the respiratory care space had over 3,000 CSRs and sales reps managing over 25,000 patient orders from thousands of care facilities in just one month via the Parachute Platform. Parachute’s tools can help any supplier, regardless of size, modernize patient intake with digital ordering.  

Parachute Health makes clinicians' lives easier too. With the Parachute Platform for ordering medical equipment and supplies, it’s no longer necessary for clinicians to have intimate knowledge of each insurance type, because the platform does that for them. For each task, we provide clear prompts and alert messages when information is missing or documentation is not complete. Our user workflows are so effective that we’ve reduced average wait times by up to 85%. And our 99%+ order success rates combined with delivery status visibility means that clinicians have confidence their patients are getting the lifesaving medical equipment and supplies they need — when they need it.

With the complexities of ordering handled, clinicians can focus on patient care over paperwork, and DME suppliers can focus on sourcing and sending the right products on time, not chasing down documentation. Meanwhile, patients can be released home after hospitalization and rehab stays with confidence that they’ll have what they need to survive and thrive, without the administrative and cost burden of extra nights in the hospital due to lacking paperwork.

COPD is a serious medical diagnosis, but with the help of the Parachute Platform, ordering clinicians and respiratory therapists can make sure patients receive the vital medical equipment and supplies they need. Our hope is that when patients are healthier and enjoying improved quality of life and health systems are stronger thanks to lower administrative burden, everyone can breathe a little easier.

Healthcare providers: Try delightfully simple DME ordering today.

Suppliers: Find out how Parachute can help modernize your patient intake today.