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VIDEO: Committee Addresses Step Therapy, Cannabis use in IBD
LAS VEGAS — In this exclusive video from Crohn’s & Colitis Congress 2019, David T. Rubin, MD, AGAF, section chief of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, and co-director of the Digestive Diseases Center at the University of Chicago Medicine, discusses some of the initiatives the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s Government and Industry Affairs Committee worked on while at the meeting.
“Some of the different initiatives [the] organization and [the] committee are working on are really important for patients and providers to know about,” Rubin, who is also an organizing committee co-chair of the Crohn’s & Colitis Congress, told Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease. “They have specifically targeted the concept of step therapy that many payers are using in order to require patients to go on less expensive therapies before they get to the ones that might be prescribed by providers.”
Rubin said another topic that the committee discussed the use of cannabis in inflammatory bowel disease.
“We talked about the evolving understanding and interest in cannabis, both for symptom relief as well as to understand how we might do research on it and because it’s regulated federally [and] there’s some challenges to doing that, and the Government and Industry Affairs Committee is trying to tackle that,” he said.
Rubin also highlighted a new initiative that the committee is working on called ‘Avoid Confusion, Know Your Infusion,’ which is aimed at helping patients ask questions to understand what therapies they are receiving.
“We certainly recognize that biosimilars to infliximab [Remicade, Janssen] are now available and many patients are being switched to those or being put on those as their first-line biological therapy but may not know what therapy they’re receiving or which version of the infliximab they are receiving,” he said.
Disclosure: Rubin reports no relevant financial disclosures.