Digital Respiratory Healthcare: Volume 102

Hilary Pinnock is Professor of Primary Care Respiratory Medicine at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, UK). She leads programmes of work in the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research and the RESPIRE Global Health Research Unit funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. She is co-Lead of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Clinical Research Collaboration CONNECT, which focuses on implementation of digital respiratory care.

Building on a career as a family physician, her research focusses on delivery of care. Specific examples include the IMP2ART (IMPlementing IMProved Asthma self-management as RouTine) programme of work, which developed and evaluated implementation strategies that facilitate supported asthma selfmanagement in routine care, and the Telescot programme, which tested and implemented digital health for respiratory and other noncommunicable diseases. With the RESPIRE team in Bangladesh, India and Malaysia, she is leading a programme of work delivering pulmonary rehabilitation (both home-based and centre-based) in low-resource settings, which will be evaluated in the PuRe trial (funded by the Medical Research Council). Previous projects include exploring supportive care for people with severe COPD and the potential of general practitioners with special clinical interests to enhance healthcare delivery. Building research capacity is embedded in this work and all the programmes have attached PhD students, incorporate Masters and undergraduate projects, and support the professional development of early career researchers.

Hilary is Chair of the Education Council of the ERS and has been actively involved with the International Primary Care Respiratory Group (IPCRG). She is a member of the British Thoracic Society (BTS)/Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) British Asthma Guideline Development Group, and is an Associate Editor of npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine.

Vitalii Poberezhets is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Propedeutics of Internal Medicine at the National Pirogov Memorial Medical University (Vinnytsya, Ukraine). He is an adult pulmonologist and clinical researcher with a particular interest in airway diseases. From 2018 to 2022, he was a PhD student in internal medicine at the National Pirogov Memorial Medical University.

Vitalii is an active member of the European Respiratory Society (ERS), with expertise in m-health/e-health technologies in particular. He is Chair of the m-Health/e-health Group of the ERS, and is author and compiler of the monthly literature update on telemedicine of clinically relevant English-language articles for members of the group. Vitalii has participated in numerous activities as a speaker, highlighting various aspects of digital technology use in respiratory medicine, as follows: at the ERS Congresses of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023; at the ERS Presidential Summit in 2021, “Digital respiratory medicine – realism vs futurism”; in an ERS webinar entitle “Evidence-based eHealth for COPD”; and at a joint meeting organised by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the ERS entitled “Digital innovations, TB and implementation research”.

Vitalii is a current and GOLD Assembly member (Ukraine national delegate). He was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Digital Health Roster of Experts (2020–2022). Vitalii is co-chair of the American Thoracic Society (ATS) project for home-based monitoring using spirometry and pulse oximetry in adults with chronic lung disease. He is a current member of the Ukrainian working group on the development of a national standard for the management and treatment of COPD.

David Drummond is a paediatric pulmonologist at the University Hospital Necker-Enfants Malades (Paris, France) and Associate Professor at the Université de Paris Cité (Paris). His research focuses on digital health for children with respiratory diseases, and in particular on how continuous home monitoring of these children can lead to timely and personalised care.

David is the principal investigator of several studies using connected inhalers (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04810169) or social robots (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04942639), and was elected in January 2022 as secretary of the m-Health/e-health Group of the European Respiratory Society (ERS).

Within ERS, David is a member of the core group of the CONNECT clinical research collaboration (Moving multiple digital innovations towards connected respiratory care: addressing the over-arching challenges of whole systems implementation) launched in 2023.