VIDEO: Better awareness of ulcerative colitis for patients, physicians

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 I think there's significant benefits for everyone, first and foremost, for our patients. I think being able to finally practice individualized, personalized care in a patient who has and suffers from ulcerative colitis is key and it's very important. So being able to understand their specific disease, their ulcerative colitis, not ulcerative colitis as a whole, but the ulcerative colitis that that individual patient has, and appropriately determining, again, based off of disease activity and those prognostic factors, disease severity, distinguishing that and understanding that and having that appropriate conversation with your patients through shared decision making to determine, what are our goals of treatment? What are their goals? What do they hope to have back in a sense of maybe improvement in those patient-reported outcomes? Maybe the quality of life factor, and this is a different, a component of PROs that we are, again, evaluating in advance. So, this is the benefit of recognizing that if we have controlled disease, the only way we can have that is recognizing that we're appropriately defining, what does control mean? Is it symptoms alone? Is it our endoscopic goals? Is it our laboratory goals? Well, in fact, it's all of it. So appropriately defining that and discussing that and communicating that is going to be essential.

Also, recognizing that it's very important for us to emphasize the risk of uncontrolled disease, uncontrolled inflammation. Oftentimes, I think we are certainly, appropriately so, concerned about the safety profile of medications as an example, medications that we use to treat ulcerative colitis. And certainly, that is very important and I don't want to minimize that, but I think it's also just as important, if not more important, to emphasize and discuss appropriately with the patients as far as, what is the risk of uncontrolled disease. Uncontrolled inflammation results in a higher risk for having other adverse events. For example, the risk for thromboembolism, infection, malignancy, all of these risks are higher with uncontrolled disease, so certainly having these conversations between both patient and providers is essential, and this is where shared decision making is really important, especially when managing and caring for patients who suffer with ulcerative colitis.