LO
PilotProcess & self-service2025-06-20
A children's hospital's home ventilator programme switched to biweekly remote equipment-data review by respiratory therapists and reported a 38.7% drop in home visits
Respiratory therapistoccupation page →
Event date / reported
2025-06-20 · reported 2025-09-01
Evidence stage
PilotSmall-scale trial in a real setting. Tells us the deployment conditions are being tested, not that they hold — so one pilot is never enough on its own; two independent ones are.
Tasks this bears on
Home ventilation and chronic care
Setting up home ventilators and oxygen, teaching patients and families, and following up people with chronic lung disease.
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
One US children's hospital's own home-care respiratory therapy service, pediatric tracheostomy/ventilator patients, reported as a quality-improvement initiative (before/after comparison against the prior year and a pre-COVID-19 baseline, not a randomised trial). Respiratory therapists review electronic health records and ventilator-equipment downloads biweekly and decide whether a home or video contact is needed instead of routine fixed-schedule visits; in-home assessment continues at least every three months. It establishes a 38.7% reduction in home visits versus the prior year and 59.6% versus the pre-COVID-19 baseline, with statistical-process-control analysis showing special-cause variation (p<0.05); a 21.01% reduction in on-call ventilator volume and a 5.8% increase in patients reclassified to lower acuity were also reported but the authors say neither reached significance because of low sample size. It does not establish how many respiratory therapists this hospital employs or their hours, and it is one hospital's pediatric programme, not a measure of the occupation generally. The publisher's full text sits behind a script-blocking wall; the figures above are quoted from the article's own abstract as indexed by PubMed/MEDLINE (US National Library of Medicine) and cross-checked against the publisher's Crossref bibliographic record (same title, authors, journal, volume, issue, pages and DOI).
What this means
A second, independent real-world programme — after the French eVENT trial — where a device sends data and a respiratory therapist reviews it and decides what to do, this time replacing fixed home visits at a US children's hospital. Two independent pilot-stage records now back this direction, so the home-and-chronic-care task moves from inferred to evidenced.
What it does not yet show
One pediatric programme at one hospital; it does not say whether adult respiratory therapists' home-care work is changing the same way, how many therapist hours or positions this freed up, or whether other hospitals have done the same.
What you can check
Ask a home-care or chronic-disease respiratory therapy service near you whether it reviews ventilator or oxygen equipment data remotely between visits, and how it decides when an in-person visit is still needed.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. Nor did this record change a layer: all 1 linked judgement above already rested on earlier evidence. This one adds to them.
Source
Shesser L, Tamasitis J, Chuo J — A Remote Patient Management Care Model for Pediatric Home Care Ventilator Patients Conserves Resources: A Quality Improvement Initiative, The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, Vol 51 No 9, pp 566-573 (published online 20 June 2025; PubMed 40752994) · verified 2026-10-05 · VOLO agent loop · interpreted 2026-10-05 · VOLO agent loop
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.