Christina Ha, MD, on Managing IBD Care for the Young Adult

Dr Ha reviews her presentation reviews her presentation from the Advances in Inflammatory Bowel Disease regional meeting April 16 on how to help young patients with IBD make a smooth transition from pediatric to adult care.

Christina Ha, MD, is a gastroenterologist from the IBD Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, California.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr Christina Ha: Hi, my name is Christina Ha. I'm part of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Cedars-Sinai, and I gave a talk on managing IBD care for the young adult. This is incredibly important because 10% to 15% of people are diagnosed with their Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis as children.

Children will become adults, and we have to make sure that the systems are in place to have a successful transition of care. I emphasize the word transition because it's very different than a transfer of care, which basically says, "See you later. Go establish care with an adult gastroenterologist who specializes in IBD."

It's really important not to do a transfer, but a transition of care. A transition of care implies that you're going to prepare the patient themselves for readiness to become an adult who manages his or her own inflammatory bowel disease. You're also preparing the parent, and you're preparing the adult gastroenterologist to ensure smooth transitions.

In order to do that, we have to make sure that the child is educated on what their Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis is, what medications they've been on, and to be able to actually summarize some of their medical history. We also have to prepare the parents to let the child, the adolescent, and then young adult speak for themselves, be confident in relaying their symptoms to the provider.

We also have to prepare the adult gastroenterologists by being able to prepare summaries, so that we understand what their natural history of their Crohn's or colitis is at the time of the transition. Knowing all of this will improve medication adherence, confidence in the health care system, and appropriate healthcare utilization.

There are many people who are very interested in ensuring transitions of care from one group to another, and it's very important that we start this process early. It's recommended to start this process as early as 12 to 14 years of age.

Additionally, one aspect of transitions of care is also to make sure that the young adults are aware of the transition where they get out of their parent's insurance and have to find their own. That occurs around 25 to 26.

All these factors are things that we need to think about as we're moving from pediatrics to adolescence, to young adults, to full adults. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Thank you so much.