Curant Health today announced the launch of project “A.L.I.V.E.” (Adherence and Long-term IBD Value-added Effectiveness) in partnership with the Meyerhoff Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. This study will allow clinicians to “implement and evaluate the effectiveness of an Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Medication Therapy Management (MTM) patient fulfillment model compared to standard care in a large university hospital setting.”
The announcement was made at the Medcity ENGAGE meeting in Bethesda, Maryland, where healthcare professionals are discussing perhaps the biggest challenge in healthcare — patient engagement. Curant Health is directly involved in addressing patient engagement, developing and implementing management protocols for chronic disease patients.
IBD is a chronic condition, with the most common types being Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). It is a disease without a cure and is associated with extremely high healthcare costs, due to its lifetime care need, reaching more than $1.8 billion dollars in total annually in the US alone.
Increasingly recognized in the healthcare community is the absence of long-run reports on CD or UC. Therefore, data on Adverse Drug Events (ADE’s), hospital readmissions, and long-run adherence rates among these patients is currently very limited. An integrated MTM platform will allow for tackling these issues and evaluating the impact on IBD patients’ clinical outcomes.
Pharmacists in MTM sessions will perform a comprehensive and global evaluation of patients’ medication, identify therapy-related issues, monitor therapy progress, and educate patients on the importance of medication compliance. Additionally, the teams will provide instructions for administrating medications and highlight possible side effects.
Patrick Dunham, President and CEO of Curant Health, commented, “Our enhanced medication therapy management services are proven to reduce readmissions rates and improve adherence to medication regimens for chronically ill patients the most difficult and costly to treat. Continuing to validate our work alongside Dr. Dudley-Brown and her colleagues and most importantly improving the lives of people suffering from chronic conditions like IBD is central to our mission.”