An Inclusive supply chain model for the treatment of respiratory diseases based on Personalized medicine through modern biosensing devices

The relentless escalation of healthcare costs and the ageing population process in industrialized countries threaten the long-term sustainability of modern healthcare systems. In particular, respiratory diseases, affecting around 500 million people globally, are a most relevant cause of inability and mortality worldwide and a main contributor to global healthcare spending. Increasing the coverage of healthcare systems in order to strengthen prevention and diagnostics is regarded as the only viable possibility to reduce the costs of treatment while maintaining or improving the quality of patient care. In such regard, the recent technological advances in biosensing and ICT technologies offer a substantial opportunity to implement advanced self-testing systems allowing for the provision of territorial servicers in coherence with the modern approaches to patient-centric and personalized medicine. Most of the testing operation in respiratory medicine, however, are currently performed in specialized labs, with costly and bulky equipment operated by professional personnel, thus making decentralized healthcare approaches a hardly viable and economically sustainable solution. The lack of effective screening and prevention programs, the significant incidence of underdiagnosed or late-diagnosed cases complicates the treatment of respiratory diseases and increases the overall costs. In such context this paper proposes a novel personalized testing method for respiratory diseases, and discusses the achievable benefits compared to traditional “Point of Care” (POC) and lab-based testing, thus offering an original contribution to the scientific debate on the effectiveness of decentralized healthcare Supply Chain (SC) models and some relevant insights on self-testing and community healthcare. Based on the results obtained, the proposed personalized testing method emerges a viable possibility to establish affordable screening and prevention of respiratory diseases, thus improving the inclusiveness of the services while preserving the economic sustainability of the healthcare system.