FROM CLINICAL GASTROENTEROLOGY AND HEPATOLOGY
Even high-volume referral centers varied significantly in their use of immunomodulators and some other therapies for patients with inflammatory bowel disease, particularly Crohn’s disease, a prospective cohort study found.
“The development and implementation of evidence-based standards of care may reduce variations and improve patient outcomes,” Dr. Ashwin Ananthakrishnan of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his associates wrote in the June issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (2014 Nov. 21 [ doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2014.11.020 ]). “Because adherence to guidelines frequently is inadequate, a reduction of practice variation also requires continual improvement, including setting goals and repeated measurement of processes to identify how standardizing care impacts outcomes.”
New biologics have created increasingly diverse treatment options for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but few studies have looked at how clinicians and patients choose treatment regimens in daily practice, the researchers noted. To explore the issue, they prospectively studied 1,659 adults with Crohn’s disease (CD) and 946 patients with ulcerative colitis who were treated at one of seven academic medical centers, all of which see a high volume of IBD patients.
Referral centers varied about threefold in their use of immunomodulators for CD (odds ratio for between-center differences, 3.34; 95% confidence interval, 2.09-5.32) in a model that controlled for age at diagnosis, sex, race, smoking status, and duration and extent or behavior of disease, the researchers reported. Use of immunomodulators for ulcerative colitis varied by more than twofold, they found (OR, 2.32; 95% CI, 1.05 to 5.13). Furthermore, they uncovered significant differences in use of oral mesalamine in both forms of IBD, and in the use of corticosteroids and immunomodulator-tumor necrosis factor antagonist combinations for CD, they said.
Treatment practices tended to vary more for CD than for ulcerative colitis, perhaps because CD spans a broader spectrum of pathologies or because clinicians have not yet reached consensus on early aggressive therapy or treatment strategies for CD, the researchers said. “Variations in treatment generally occur when there is uncertainty about the best practice,” they commented. “It is possible that the variations will diminish as evidence on effective IBD therapy grows and evidence-based guidelines become available and are implemented. The continued variation suggests that there is significant potential for standardization of care across referral and community practices.”
The study did not pinpoint reasons for discrepancies in practice, which could have reflected differences related to referring physicians’ or patients’ behaviors or expectations, the researchers said. But the findings did not reflect a single outlier center, and the cohort was not chosen to study variations between centers, which should have helped eliminate selection bias, they added.
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust funded the study. Dr. Ananthakrishnan reported advisory board payments from Cubist Pharmaceuticals and AbbVe. One coauthor reported financial conflicts of interest with numerous pharmaceutical companies. The other authors reported no conflicts of interest.
