Patients and doctors group meetings: an innovative way to explore severe asthma backstage.

Abstract

Severe asthma patients' life is heavily influenced by the disease, which has impact on personal and professional choices or general lifestyle. Despite the available tools to help physicians investigating the patient-reported outcomes there is a need for a more standardised and structured approach to include the evaluation of quality of life together with the emotions of patients into the routine clinical interaction. We hereby report the use of an active listening and insight approach to understand the emotions of patients with severe asthma through dedicated in-person meetings involving a group of patients with their doctors, caregivers and an external moderator. The initiative "Patients insight meeting" was organized within 17 specialist referral centres for severe asthma in Italy in 2019 and involved 149 patients. Insights related to 4 different items were collected and a task force composed by the external moderators produced a general report including the suggestions from the participating centres. This experience of group-meetings involving both patients and doctors together represents an innovative way to investigate real life experience and the emotions of asthmatic patients, highlighting unmet needs related to patient's experience of his/her disease that need to be included in severe asthmatics' management strategy.