Kerri Aronson, MD

Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis (HP) is a type of interstitial lung disease that develops after inhalation of an environmental allergen in a susceptible person. HP has a negative effect on quality of life. Unfortunately, there is not much accurate and patient-friendly education material about HP. We plan to use a validated digital health platform to develop a patient curriculum about HP and study how this improves patients’ knowledge, satisfaction, and quality of life. We will ask patients to describe and prioritize the questions about living with HP they feel are most important, and then subsequently build an interactive virtual curriculum that address these knowledge gaps. This research will lay the groundwork for a future study that combines patient education and peer support for patients with HP, with the goal of improving quality of life and disease-specific knowledge.

Update:
We are conducting focus group sessions with a diverse group of patients with hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP) with the goal of identifying and prioritizing patients’ top priority questions about the disease. These questions will then be answered in a digital health education curriculum geared towards improving knowledge gaps, self-efficacy and quality of life of patients living with HP.