I: Managing PF after diagnosis

Home monitoring for pulmonary fibrosis helps track symptoms and oxygen levels without frequent hospital visits. Stable patients may be reviewed every six to twelve months, while those with progressive disease need closer follow-up. New home tools, like daily spirometry, aim to detect early signs of disease progression and ensure timely medical care.

 

🎥 Watch the Video: What can I do to manage pulmonary fibrosis after diagnosis?

 

Professor Porter discusses the following:

• Can pulmonary fibrosis patients be monitored from home?
• How can I help a patient with pulmonary fibrosis at home?
• Can a patient monitor their pulmonary fibrosis symptoms at home?
• How often should I see my pulmonary fibrosis specialist doctor?

 

Full Video Transcript

There is so much interest, which was started off really during the COVID pandemic, of home monitoring. What this means is really keeping an eye on patient’s symptoms whilst they’re at home, so we don’t have to keep bringing them into hospital.

I would say that, if you have stable pulmonary fibrosis, then you can probably be seen every 6 to 12 months by your specialist.  However, if you have more progressive disease, we like to see our patients every 3 months, and sooner if they have very progressive disease. 

Some of our patients can be managed at home. Those who are happy and confident using a pulse oximeter at home, and can tell us when their symptoms worsen or their oxygenation of the blood, as measured by the pulse oximeter, worsens.  But, at the moment, we don’t have very good home monitoring. We are trying to develop home spirometric measuring, by which patients blow into a spirometer every day and send their results to us. This is quite onerous for patients and also can be quite challenging. But actually, at UCLH, we’re really trying to understand a bit more whether we can monitor patients more safely so that we can get very early indicators of when their disease is progressing more quickly than it has done – when they would need input from the medical profession.

 

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[Video published December 2025]