Preview: Optimizing Outcomes in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

In this video, Joel Heidelbaugh, MD, provides a preview of the session Optimizing Outcomes in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Strategies to Improve Disease Management in Primary Care at PUPC 2023, including how to apply current guidelines and therapeutic algorithms to create individualized treatment plans for patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn disease. 

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For more information about PUPC 2023 Virtual Series and to register for upcoming sessions, visit https://www.practicalupdates.consultant360.com/.

Joel Heidelbaugh, MD, is a family physician at the University of Michigan Medical School (Ann Arbor, MI).

TRANSCRIPTION:

Dr Joel Heidelbaugh: Greetings. I'm Dr. Joel Heidelbaugh. I'm a family physician at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On behalf of my colleagues, Dr. Pabla, and our patient advocate, Sneha Dave, I'd like to introduce our program and invite you to participate. This is going to be a very information-rich and hopefully very useful segment on inflammatory bowel disease.

We're going to start the session by providing an overview of inflammatory bowel disease, talking about various subtypes, prevalence, burden of illness, and clinical presentation, mostly focusing on ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, the two most common and prevalent forms. We're going to talk about how there's a lack of awareness of these diseases, how they often get confused with other diseases and disorders, and we'll also talk about some of the public stigma associated with these disorders.

I'm going to highlight some challenges with health inequities in terms of not only recognition but in treatment and follow-up. We're going to talk about the importance of making a diagnosis and the risk of diagnostic delay. This is really important, especially in primary care. We want to be able to give primary care providers the necessary information, tips, and tricks on how to be able to make a confident diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease in a primary care practice and also highlight the appropriateness of referral to gastroenterology.

We're also going to further explore the role of the primary care provider in the management of inflammatory bowel disease with ways to minimize diagnostic delay, but also highlight long-term care and treatment. This is going to talk about the recognition of adverse effects of medications, recognition of alarm signs and symptoms, and also the importance of ongoing health maintenance because if patients are going to receive immunosuppressive medications, that's going to have a specific impact on health maintenance and surveillance.

Our patient advocate is also going to talk about the impact of health inequities on care for patients with inflammatory bowel disease and specifically patient quality of life information. Dr. Pabla, our gastroenterologist, is going to highlight the IBD treatment armamentarium, giving an overview of traditional treatment options and the need for improved targeted therapies. He'll talk about treatment discontinuation rates, and relapse, also tying in with prevalence, and really focusing on how to induce remission and ongoing surveillance. He will highlight a focus on anti-integrin therapies and the role of integrins in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, and the rationale for targeting integrins as a treatment option for both forms. He'll talk about safety and efficacy data, mechanism of action, and treatment indications, and give some very up-to-date information comparing comparative trials.

Our patient advocate will talk about positive treatment outcomes with anti-integrin therapy, and it's really great that we have a patient advocate as part of this segment to really bring in a patient-centered experience, and I think there's some importance to that.

We'll highlight evidence-based guidelines and treatment algorithms.

Lastly, we'll end the segment by talking about how to best individualize management for optimal outcomes and really the importance of multidisciplinary care. This is not a disease or disorder constellation that can be managed solely by gastroenterology or primary care, but we'll talk about the importance of communication and ongoing longitudinal management of patients with IBD between primary care, gastroenterology, and then other resources we use, including our dieticians and our nutritionists. So we hope you find this to be a very informative segment. We've put a lot of effort into creating a very up-to-date compendium of information for you. Enjoy the program.