VIDEO: Healio Lifetime Disruptor winner highlights need to ‘eliminate disparities’ in GI
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In a Healio video exclusive, Mark B. Pochapin, MD, winner of the 2022 Healio Lifetime Disruptor Award, shares his perspective about advances in gastroenterology over the past few decades and how the field will progress in years to come.
“I am really thrilled because it allows me to reflect on what was disruptive technology or innovation in our profession and where we are going,” Pochapin, director of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at NYU Langone Health, said. “Over the past 25 years, we have really seen a lot of disruptive innovation in the field of GI.”
Pochapin highlighted discovery of a treatment and cure for hepatitis C infection, evolution of care for inflammatory bowel disease, and advances in endoscopic surgery and colorectal cancer.
“Seeing the significant drop in both incidence and mortality for our patients with colorectal disease has been truly gratifying,” he said. “We have really made so much progress in our ability to screen and to prevent disease, but we have to do better. … We have to figure out why we are seeing a leveling off and a dropping of our improvement, particularly with the increased incidence in younger patients.”
Looking ahead, Pochapin predicts artificial intelligence and other new technology will continue to enhance physicians’ decision-making abilities and that breakthroughs in precision medicine, gut microbiota and stool-based therapeutics, and liver transplantation will transform patient care.
Despite these advances, Pochapin acknowledged ongoing disparities in gastroenterology, including the higher incidence of colorectal cancer and related mortality in Black Americans.
“We are recognizing the importance of social determinants of health and that our zip code may actually be more important in determining outcomes of certain conditions like colon cancer than our genetic code,” he said. “We can and must do better and eliminate these disparities.”
The 2023 Healio Lifetime Disruptor Award winner will be announced in October during the Healio Disruptive Innovators ceremony at ACG 2023 in Vancouver, Canada.
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