The Economic Burden of Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Clear Problem, Unclear Solution

Excerpt

Caring for and treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients may represent the most challenging aspect of a gastroenterologist’s clinical practice. One must properly assess the disease severity, make appropriate therapeutic recommendations, induce a sustained remission, and pay attention to many details during monitoring of care, all the while trying to keep up with a rapidly changing field that will soon introduce a host of new medications. As if this weren’t enough, we should also be mindful of the cost of IBD care. In our busy day-to-day practices, we likely do not appreciate how our clinical decision-making impacts the patient personally through their pocket book and affects the insurance system on which they depend. The article by Gunnarsson et al. [1] published in this issue of Digestive Diseases and Science highlights the economic burden of caring for Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) patients. The results are sobering. IBD care is expensive, and in this era of cost containment and health care reform, we as gastroenterologists need to prepare ourselves and take action to combat this growing problem. …