TY - JOUR T1 - The promise of electronic data capture in respiratory medicine JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J SP - 228 LP - 230 DO - 10.1183/09031936.00141310 VL - 37 IS - 2 AU - N. Johnston AU - P. O'Byrne AU - M. Kolb Y1 - 2011/02/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/37/2/228.abstract N2 - In the 17th century the English physician John Floyer, himself severely asthmatic, used symptom diaries to record his own and his patients’ symptoms to understand the determinants of asthma exacerbations, and inform disease management 1. If long-term serial data on designated patients with chronic lung disease were available to physicians, it could fundamentally change clinical practice and influence the design of clinical research studies. However, methods of symptom diary data collection that frustrate patients and which require analysis by physicians before interpretation are unlikely to achieve broad success. A recent editorial in the European Respiratory Journal 2 drew attention to the emphasis, in current guidelines for asthma management 3 and in the conduct of clinical trials in asthma 4, of the importance of estimating “future risk” to patients. The concept has equal relevance in other chronic lung diseases. Guidances issued by both the European Medicines Agency and the US Food and Drug Administration 5, 6 have contemplated and encouraged the adoption of patient reported outcomes (PROs) in chronic disease research.The report by Liu et al. 7 in the current issue of the European Respiratory Journal describes the experimental evaluation of a mobile telephone-based system compared with a paper diary for monitoring the management of adult asthmatics, and found significant clinical improvements in the electronically monitored patients. As noted in a recent meta-analysis of studies of electronic patient-reported symptom monitoring in respiratory disease 8, there are as yet an inadequate number of published reports of studies with robust designs and formal evaluation in this area, and the study by Liu et al. 7 is a welcome addition. The approach taken to symptom diary data collection was inexpensive and used technologies that are becoming almost universally available.Importantly, this study also showed good patient … ER -