Corey Siegel, MD, on the RADIUS Rural Outreach Program in IBD
Dr Siegel updates the work of the RADIUS outreach program that provides care for patients with inflammatory bowel disease in rural areas in 4 locations nationally.
Corey Siegel, MD, is the section chief of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and the codirector of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Hi, I'm Corey Siegel. I'm the director for the Center for Digestive Health at the Dartmouth -Hitchcock Medical Center, and I'm coming to you from Philadelphia at the ACG 2024 conference. At this meeting, I gave an update on our RADIUS program.
RADIUS stands for Rural APPs Delivering IBD Care in the United States. This was designed to try to close the gap that we have in patients living in rural regions who have a really hard time getting access to IBD specialists. So what RADIUS does is it set up a hub and spoke model with IBD specialty centers delivering care via telemedicine in a multidisciplinary approach to small practices in rural United States. The patients have a 2-hour visit where they see an IBD specialist, an IBD psychologist, an IBD dietitian, an IBD pharmacist, and an IBD nurse to help put together the story and make sure that we understand where they are now and give recommendations for the future.
The patients never come to the main center, so they're able to get easy access and then work with their local APPs to deliver the care where they live. The beauty of the program is the APPs have a close connection with the IBD Center and the IBD Centers meet with them virtually every 1 or 2 months to review all of their patients and get an update on how patients are doing and if changes need to be made in their therapy plan.
The update I gave here is that we're now over 400 patients in the program in northern New England and very excited to announce that we've opened 3 other sites across the United States in Portland, Oregon, in Denver, Colorado, and in Nashville, Tennessee. So we now have 4 hubs with spoke sites around all of these hubs so that we can reach more people in rural regions across the United States.
The feedback from patients is fantastic. The referring APPs love the support, and we love delivering this type of care, giving access to patients where they can't typically get access to a full group and multidisciplinary plan like this. We look forward to giving you more updates on RADIUS as we evolve and thank you for your interest.
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