A new study from San Diego-based sleep monitoring company ResMed shows that patients on positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy for their sleep apnea are more likely to be compliant when they manage their therapy with a patient-facing app. 

The study of 128,000 patients, which is being presented tomorrow at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians, wasn’t randomized but did match patients by propensity score to reduce bias. All patients used ResMed devices and AirView, ResMed’s cloud-based provider-facing monitoring tool. But only some patients used myAir, ResMed’s patient engagement app.

The app, which launched in August, provides contextual information-based coaching on how to improve their therapy through videos, emails and encouragement along the way. A user can put on the CPAP mask at night, then log in to the app the next morning to get their “myAir score”, based on a scale of one to 100, that comprises different elements of therapy – how long they slept on CPAP, how many apneas (pauses in breathing) they had per hour and how well their CPAP mask fit.

“Our patients engage with their therapy so much more after joining myAir, since it’s easy to use and understand the data,” John Quinlan, owner of Quinlan’s Pharmacy and Medical Equipment in Upstate New York, said in a statement. “When more engagement leads to better compliance, I think equipment providers everywhere should encourage their patients to use tools like myAir.”

Of the patients that engaged with the myAir app, 87 percent were compliant to the therapy. Of the patients that didn’t use the app, that number was just 70 percent. The app group also used the PAP machine for an average of an extra hour each day.

“This new study shows that online self-monitoring tools engage patients and significantly improve their compliance and adherence to treatment,” ResMed Medical Director Adam Benjafield said in a statement. “While our study focused on PAP users, we believe these results may be generalized more broadly in terms of the role online tools can have in improving medical treatment compliance overall.”

The company noted that even the 70 percent adherence rate for those that were monitored but didn’t have access to the monitoring data is an improvement over traditional CPAP adherence, which can be as low as 50 percent.