Food allergies, education take spotlight at ACAAI Annual Scientific Meeting

After working with the American College of Asthma, Allergy & Immunology for 3 decades, Kathleen May, MD, FACAAI, is excited to be taking its reins as president during its 2022 Annual Scientific Meeting, Nov. 10 to 14, in Louisville, Ky.

“We’re the best kept secret in medicine,” May, who also serves as division chief of allergy-immunology and pediatric rheumatology, the Betty B. Wray MD Distinguished Chair in Pediatrics, professor of pediatrics and medicine, and program director for the allergy-immunology fellowship program at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, told Healio. “We really provide a significant benefit to patients and their quality of life. Those of us who have done this for 30 years really understand that.”

Meeting highlights

After going virtual in 2020, the ACAAI was the first national organization in allergy and asthma to return to in-person meetings in 2021. According to May, the ACAAI expects this year’s attendance to be significantly higher than last year.

“We’re expanding on the in-person experience,” she said.

The International Food Allergy Symposium returns to the conference on Nov. 10. Hosts Aikaterini “Katherine” Anagnostou, MD, PhD, FACAAI, and Jay A. Lieberman, MD, FACAAI, will moderate sessions on epidemiology and diagnostics, prevention, oral immunotherapy, treatment, other hot topics and even some debates.

Plus, Anagnostou will present the symposium’s Luisa Businco Lecture on “Common Oral Immunotherapy Challenges in Your Allergy Clinic.”

“There have been just so many developments since the last time we held the symposium,” May said. “There’s just been so much in the field, and it’s really exciting. It’s very timely to have it right now.”

May also said that attendees should see outgoing president Mark L. Corbett, MD, FACAAI, and his presidential plenary series on Nov. 12, “Food Allergy – Where Are We in 2022?” Topics will include food allergy testing, oral immunotherapy and eosinophilic esophagitis.

“That’s going to be a very high-level summary of what’s going on in the field of food allergy,” May said.

The availability of FDA-approved food allergy treatment and new research in the pipeline are driving this focus on food allergy, May said, but other events and topics will take the spotlight as well.

“There’s a series that we call Podium to Practice: Advancing Allergy and Immunology Care, which is the enduring meeting theme, since the College tends to provide very high-level and practical take-home points for community allergists,” May said.

For example, sessions will address advances in severe asthma treatment, atopic dermatitis and telemedicine, which May called a trend that is here to stay.

“It’s not just the content about the medical information. It’s also the content about how we practice, and that is evolving and changing as well,” she said.

Additional highlights will include the Nov. 13 plenary session, with Thomas B. Casale, MD, FACAAI, presenting “What Does the Landscape of Therapeutics Look Like in Allergy Practice” as the meeting’s Edward J. O’Connell Lecture.

And on Nov. 14, Cherie Zachary, MD, FACAAI, will present “Implicit Bias: It Is Not Always What You See” for the Bela Schick Lecture, which is the only presentation where speakers get carte blanche to discuss a topic of their own choosing.

“There’s so much that we can talk about,” May told Healio. “I just see great opportunity with what we see going forward and opportunity to improve practices at the community level.”

Presidential priorities

Beyond the meeting, May said that advocacy will be central to her tenure as president. Although telemedicine has enabled many clinicians to maintain and expand their practice during the pandemic, for instance, May said that coverage for these services may expire once the public health emergency is over.

“We are working with our Advocacy Council to get expansion of that payment parity so that practitioners can continue to provide that care in telehealth,” May said. “We really can’t go back to the way it was. I think that patients want this as well.”

The ACAAI also wants to ensure that issues with the Medicare fee schedule do not have a negative impact on practices that are operating on relatively thin margins with higher overhead because of inflation, May said, while keeping patients in mind.

“We want to reduce prior authorization burdens,” she said. “There’s also a trend to advocate for reducing the step therapy requirements that some insurers are requiring, and that’s really inhibiting patients’ ability to get the care they need.”

Shared decision-making is playing a growing role in care too, she said. May, who also is a clinician educator and director of the training program at the Medical College of Georgia, sees how academics can train the next generation of physicians in using this model.

“This is the future, and many training programs are very well versed in it,” she said. “Our patients would like more information, and we want them to be active participants. We find that when patients are more engaged, they are more likely to follow through and benefit from their therapy. Everyone wins, especially the patients.”

Further, May said that the ACAAI is working with lay groups, airlines and legislators alike to improve access to epinephrine during flights because there is inconsistency in practices across the industry, with legislation as a final goal.

“If you’re flying, obviously, you can’t just stop at your local emergency department,” she said. “There have been issues.”

And while legislation requiring good faith estimates in practice was drafted with good intentions and has been popular among patients, May noted that these requirements would benefit from some nuance.

“It has placed a really high burden on private practices to come up with every single cost that could possibly be associated with a visit. It has become burdensome. It wasn’t the intent of the legislation, but that’s one area that we really do need to address,” she said.

May also recognizes the important role that specialists can play in educating patients as well as nurses, advanced practice providers, residents and even primary care providers, noting that the ACAAI could provide resources for this training.

“One of the initiatives I would like to carry forward in the next year would be to have a more formal toolkit for our practitioners in the community who would like to do some teaching, so they have a framework to do that,” she said.

May noted the importance of reaching out to medical students, including those in primary care, so they would have a better understanding of allergy and immunology because many medical schools lack academic presence in the specialty.

“There are two important benefits to the people rotating. First will be that they will get to see what we do and will have a better understanding of the complexity of allergy and immunology,” May said.

“The second is that this may increase the pipeline for a more diverse population that wants to pursue allergy as a career,” she continued. “We have an increasingly diverse population in the country, and we want our specialty to represent that as well.”

Between the conference and these goals, May is optimistic about the future of allergy and asthma care, especially considering the unprecedented availability of life-altering and game-changing monoclonal antibody therapy.

“It is such a burgeoning area, we want to provide information to all of our members so they realize where each of these pieces fit in their treatment armamentarium. It is continually evolving and ever-changing,” she said.