Optimizing Outcomes in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Strategies to Improve Disease Management in Primary Care

In this video, Baldeep Pabla, MD, provides the take-home messages from his session "Optimizing Outcomes in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Strategies to Improve Disease Management in Primary Care” at our Practical Updates in Primary Care 2023 Virtual Series. Dr Pabla talks about the different agents used to treat inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), specifically ulcerative colitis and Crohn disease, and the emphasis on a multidisciplinary team for the treatment of IBD in patients.

Baldeep Pabla, MD, is an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Clinic (Nashville, Tennessee).

For more meeting coverage, visit the Practical Updates in Primary Care newsroom.

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

TRANSCRIPTION: 

Baldeep Pabla, MD: My name is Baldeep Pabla, I'm an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinic, and I'm going to provide you an overview of our talk regarding inflammatory bowel disease in the interface with primary care.

So if you missed my talk, the main things, I think, to take away from it is that there's been an explosion of therapy for the treatment of moderate to severe ulcerative colitis and Crohn's over the past 15 years. And there's many different agents that can be used to treat these diseases. For ulcerative colitis, vedolizumab is an anti-integrin therapy and is well-positioned and the bio-naïve patient for moderate to severe disease. And we have good randomized controlled studies demonstrating the effectiveness of this medication in that situation. For moderate to severe Crohn's disease, patients who have a lower inflammatory burden and a less aggressive phenotype are very well positioned to be treated with vedolizumab. It has an excellent safety profile with comparative efficacy in that population in that disease phenotype.

And finally, just emphasizing the importance of a multidisciplinary team in caring for the patient with inflammatory bowel disease, which includes primary care providers and the importance of tight communication between the primary care provider and the gastroenterologist in monitoring for treatment response, as well as adverse effects, healthcare maintenance and monitoring in patients that are enhanced on immunosuppression therapy, and the importance of making sure that we work together to optimize outcomes not only with the primary care physician and the gastroenterologist, but also with a dietician, a behavioral health specialist, and really working with that patient and their support system to make sure that we're capturing and treating all the things that come along with chronic illness.