Person-centered and integrated health care pathway for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: The Swedish algorithm for diagnosis and interprofessional management of COPD.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common disease and, globally, the third leading cause of death, yet it is often under-diagnosed. Once the diagnosis of COPD is set, an interprofessional care of the patient is required, where both pharmacological and non-pharmacological aspects (e.g., physical training, nutritional status and patient education) are integrated. Timely diagnosis and management of COPD are challenging for the healthcare systems and require a structured approach. To address this in Sweden, a national workgroup was formed in 2019, to provide a person-centered and integrated health care pathway for COPD (PICP COPD). This health care pathway is an algorithm that summarizes, in an illustrative way, the main national and international guidelines for diagnosis and management of COPD and supports their implementation in clinical practice. The Swedish Primary Care Respiratory Group (SPCRG) participated in this work, as the vast majority of patients with COPD, in Sweden, are solely managed in primary care. The final version of the algorithm was published in May 2023 and is presented in Figure 1. The full document (not shown in Figure 1) includes a detailed description of the interventions in each part of the algorithm, as well as several quality indicators that should be reported to relevant Swedish national registries for a continuous evaluation of the provided care. Although PICP COPD is developed for the Swedish health care system, it can be a source of inspiration for countries lacking structured healthcare for this group of patients.