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Interstitial lung diseases (ILDs), with their many ubiquitous symptoms, are often hard to diagnose in patients. That’s why Amirahwaty Abdullah, MBBS, and Kavitha Selvan, MD, see value in educating clinicians on how to identify and diagnose ILD.
Both Dr. Abdullah and Dr. Selvan received quality improvement grants from CHEST in October 2023 to do just that. Their projects put the ILD Clinician Toolkit into practice, created as a part of CHEST’s Bridging Specialties™: Timely Diagnosis for ILD initiative aimed at shortening the time to diagnosis.
Recently, CHEST caught up with the two grant recipients to see how their projects were progressing.
Combating the prevalence of ILDs in West Virginia
Dr. Abdullah and Co-Principal Investigator, Haroon Ahmed, MD, are two of the staff members supporting West Virginia University ILD Clinic, where the ILD Clinician Toolkit is being utilized.
“ILD is so prevalent here, so we thought it would be an excellent opportunity to do the quality improvement project here because we really do need the resources to improve the care of our [patients with ILD],” Dr. Abdullah said. “For the entire state of West Virginia, we’re the only ILD center.”
In West Virginia, many factors are at play making ILD prevalent, with a recent study showing that the state has the second highest rate of interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, Dr. Abdullah said. This is all due to the economy of the state, the rurality of the population, and the occupational hazards with common jobs like coal mining and farming.
“This topic about bridging the gap and early diagnosis really resonated with us because we see all these patients who end up seeing us after they’ve been on oxygen for years, when they can’t do anything else,” Dr. Ahmed said. “There was a big gap here, and we saw that every day in our clinical practice.”
Since implementing the ILD Clinician Toolkit into their program, the two have started providing these resources to primary care physicians in an effort to help expedite their workups when they see patients with common ILD symptoms. This was done through grand rounds and educational conferences for those practicing in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatric medicine. And more education is planned for the future.
They have also created working relationships with these departments and have encouraged them to send patients to the ILD Clinic, so patients don’t have to be referred to multiple different physicians.
The next step for the project is to implement telemedicine capabilities, which will allow the team to roll out the patient questionnaire from the toolkit. The questionnaire helps physicians gather a detailed history about their patients, including their past and current medications, surgeries, occupational and environmental exposures, and known comorbidities.
“We definitely want to reach out via telemedicine to patients because, at this point in time, some of our patients travel 3, 4 hours one way just to come see us. So, if we can make it more accessible, we will,” Dr. Abdullah said.
Their plan is to provide iPads that are equipped with the questionnaire and other toolkit resources to the providers. Through this method, the team will be able to see how often the questionnaire is used.
“We are very thankful for this grant because I do think we are saving lives,” Dr. Abdullah said. “Any little thing that we can do to improve the outcomes of these patients who have a rare but difficult-to-treat disease—it’s crucial. This gives us the ability to reach out and help patients who are out of our physical bounds.”
Diagnosing ILD among underrepresented minority populations in Chicago
Dr. Kavitha Selvan is conducting her quality improvement research project at the University of Chicago, alongside her team.
“The community we serve in South Chicago houses a significant number of underrepresented [minority populations],” she said.
“We know that Black patients with ILD experience higher rates of hospitalization, compared with White patients,” she said. “And they are hospitalized, require lung transplants, and die at a younger age too.”
In clinical practice, Dr. Selvan has noticed a trend of patients being referred for evaluation of possible ILD later and later. In some cases, several years go by before the appropriate work for ILD is initiated, and that valuable time lost leads to irreversible loss of lung function.
Dr. Selvan’s plan is to partner with primary care providers who are seeing these patients first in order to expedite the work-up and referral of ILD when appropriate and, ultimately, reduce the amount of time that passes between symptom onset and definitive diagnosis.
“To me, this grant and the resources it provided represented an important opportunity to improve outcomes in the high-risk patients we care for through early disease recognition and treatment,” she said.
Dr. Selvan’s project began with educating members of the Primary Care Group at UChicago on risk factors and exam findings that may suggest ILD in patients coming to clinic with nonspecific respiratory complaints. Then they had to equip providers with the ILD Clinician Toolkit and reach patients by handing out the patient questionnaire in primary care clinic.
The next step for this project is going to be dissecting the answers to a postintervention survey that was sent out to understand the practices and comfort of primary care providers in evaluating suspected ILD and the utility of the additional resources created by Dr. Selvan’s team.
“My hope is that we can utilize this partnership with the Primary Care Group to provide the education that’s needed both on the patient side and the provider side, like knowing not to ignore respiratory symptoms, knowing which patients warrant ILD-specific testing, and knowing what the appropriate tests are. In doing so, we can get patients into ILD clinic earlier, confirm their diagnosis, and get them initiated on the appropriate therapies sooner,” she said.
Dr. Selvan credits the quality improvement grant as being fundamental in her success as a fellow and early faculty at UChicago Medicine and believes that this project has created a culture of awareness that wouldn’t have been possible without funding.
“I truly believe that early detection and risk factor modification is the most critical aspect of interstitial lung disease care, and the mechanism for how we’re going to actually improve patient outcomes in our community,” Dr. Selvan said. “Building the infrastructure to accomplish that requires time, resources, and support from institutions and philanthropic foundations that believe in that mission too."
Opportunities like this are made possible by generous contributions from our donors. Make a gift to CHEST and select “Clinical Research” to help aid future research into interstitial lung disease and much more.
Interstitial lung diseases (ILDs), with their many ubiquitous symptoms, are often hard to diagnose in patients. That’s why Amirahwaty Abdullah, MBBS, and Kavitha Selvan, MD, see value in educating clinicians on how to identify and diagnose ILD.
Both Dr. Abdullah and Dr. Selvan received quality improvement grants from CHEST in October 2023 to do just that. Their projects put the ILD Clinician Toolkit into practice, created as a part of CHEST’s Bridging Specialties™: Timely Diagnosis for ILD initiative aimed at shortening the time to diagnosis.
Recently, CHEST caught up with the two grant recipients to see how their projects were progressing.
Combating the prevalence of ILDs in West Virginia
Dr. Abdullah and Co-Principal Investigator, Haroon Ahmed, MD, are two of the staff members supporting West Virginia University ILD Clinic, where the ILD Clinician Toolkit is being utilized.
“ILD is so prevalent here, so we thought it would be an excellent opportunity to do the quality improvement project here because we really do need the resources to improve the care of our [patients with ILD],” Dr. Abdullah said. “For the entire state of West Virginia, we’re the only ILD center.”
In West Virginia, many factors are at play making ILD prevalent, with a recent study showing that the state has the second highest rate of interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, Dr. Abdullah said. This is all due to the economy of the state, the rurality of the population, and the occupational hazards with common jobs like coal mining and farming.
“This topic about bridging the gap and early diagnosis really resonated with us because we see all these patients who end up seeing us after they’ve been on oxygen for years, when they can’t do anything else,” Dr. Ahmed said. “There was a big gap here, and we saw that every day in our clinical practice.”
Since implementing the ILD Clinician Toolkit into their program, the two have started providing these resources to primary care physicians in an effort to help expedite their workups when they see patients with common ILD symptoms. This was done through grand rounds and educational conferences for those practicing in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatric medicine. And more education is planned for the future.
They have also created working relationships with these departments and have encouraged them to send patients to the ILD Clinic, so patients don’t have to be referred to multiple different physicians.
The next step for the project is to implement telemedicine capabilities, which will allow the team to roll out the patient questionnaire from the toolkit. The questionnaire helps physicians gather a detailed history about their patients, including their past and current medications, surgeries, occupational and environmental exposures, and known comorbidities.
“We definitely want to reach out via telemedicine to patients because, at this point in time, some of our patients travel 3, 4 hours one way just to come see us. So, if we can make it more accessible, we will,” Dr. Abdullah said.
Their plan is to provide iPads that are equipped with the questionnaire and other toolkit resources to the providers. Through this method, the team will be able to see how often the questionnaire is used.
“We are very thankful for this grant because I do think we are saving lives,” Dr. Abdullah said. “Any little thing that we can do to improve the outcomes of these patients who have a rare but difficult-to-treat disease—it’s crucial. This gives us the ability to reach out and help patients who are out of our physical bounds.”
Diagnosing ILD among underrepresented minority populations in Chicago
Dr. Kavitha Selvan is conducting her quality improvement research project at the University of Chicago, alongside her team.
“The community we serve in South Chicago houses a significant number of underrepresented [minority populations],” she said.
“We know that Black patients with ILD experience higher rates of hospitalization, compared with White patients,” she said. “And they are hospitalized, require lung transplants, and die at a younger age too.”
In clinical practice, Dr. Selvan has noticed a trend of patients being referred for evaluation of possible ILD later and later. In some cases, several years go by before the appropriate work for ILD is initiated, and that valuable time lost leads to irreversible loss of lung function.
Dr. Selvan’s plan is to partner with primary care providers who are seeing these patients first in order to expedite the work-up and referral of ILD when appropriate and, ultimately, reduce the amount of time that passes between symptom onset and definitive diagnosis.
“To me, this grant and the resources it provided represented an important opportunity to improve outcomes in the high-risk patients we care for through early disease recognition and treatment,” she said.
Dr. Selvan’s project began with educating members of the Primary Care Group at UChicago on risk factors and exam findings that may suggest ILD in patients coming to clinic with nonspecific respiratory complaints. Then they had to equip providers with the ILD Clinician Toolkit and reach patients by handing out the patient questionnaire in primary care clinic.
The next step for this project is going to be dissecting the answers to a postintervention survey that was sent out to understand the practices and comfort of primary care providers in evaluating suspected ILD and the utility of the additional resources created by Dr. Selvan’s team.
“My hope is that we can utilize this partnership with the Primary Care Group to provide the education that’s needed both on the patient side and the provider side, like knowing not to ignore respiratory symptoms, knowing which patients warrant ILD-specific testing, and knowing what the appropriate tests are. In doing so, we can get patients into ILD clinic earlier, confirm their diagnosis, and get them initiated on the appropriate therapies sooner,” she said.
Dr. Selvan credits the quality improvement grant as being fundamental in her success as a fellow and early faculty at UChicago Medicine and believes that this project has created a culture of awareness that wouldn’t have been possible without funding.
“I truly believe that early detection and risk factor modification is the most critical aspect of interstitial lung disease care, and the mechanism for how we’re going to actually improve patient outcomes in our community,” Dr. Selvan said. “Building the infrastructure to accomplish that requires time, resources, and support from institutions and philanthropic foundations that believe in that mission too."
Opportunities like this are made possible by generous contributions from our donors. Make a gift to CHEST and select “Clinical Research” to help aid future research into interstitial lung disease and much more.
Interstitial lung diseases (ILDs), with their many ubiquitous symptoms, are often hard to diagnose in patients. That’s why Amirahwaty Abdullah, MBBS, and Kavitha Selvan, MD, see value in educating clinicians on how to identify and diagnose ILD.
Both Dr. Abdullah and Dr. Selvan received quality improvement grants from CHEST in October 2023 to do just that. Their projects put the ILD Clinician Toolkit into practice, created as a part of CHEST’s Bridging Specialties™: Timely Diagnosis for ILD initiative aimed at shortening the time to diagnosis.
Recently, CHEST caught up with the two grant recipients to see how their projects were progressing.
Combating the prevalence of ILDs in West Virginia
Dr. Abdullah and Co-Principal Investigator, Haroon Ahmed, MD, are two of the staff members supporting West Virginia University ILD Clinic, where the ILD Clinician Toolkit is being utilized.
“ILD is so prevalent here, so we thought it would be an excellent opportunity to do the quality improvement project here because we really do need the resources to improve the care of our [patients with ILD],” Dr. Abdullah said. “For the entire state of West Virginia, we’re the only ILD center.”
In West Virginia, many factors are at play making ILD prevalent, with a recent study showing that the state has the second highest rate of interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, Dr. Abdullah said. This is all due to the economy of the state, the rurality of the population, and the occupational hazards with common jobs like coal mining and farming.
“This topic about bridging the gap and early diagnosis really resonated with us because we see all these patients who end up seeing us after they’ve been on oxygen for years, when they can’t do anything else,” Dr. Ahmed said. “There was a big gap here, and we saw that every day in our clinical practice.”
Since implementing the ILD Clinician Toolkit into their program, the two have started providing these resources to primary care physicians in an effort to help expedite their workups when they see patients with common ILD symptoms. This was done through grand rounds and educational conferences for those practicing in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatric medicine. And more education is planned for the future.
They have also created working relationships with these departments and have encouraged them to send patients to the ILD Clinic, so patients don’t have to be referred to multiple different physicians.
The next step for the project is to implement telemedicine capabilities, which will allow the team to roll out the patient questionnaire from the toolkit. The questionnaire helps physicians gather a detailed history about their patients, including their past and current medications, surgeries, occupational and environmental exposures, and known comorbidities.
“We definitely want to reach out via telemedicine to patients because, at this point in time, some of our patients travel 3, 4 hours one way just to come see us. So, if we can make it more accessible, we will,” Dr. Abdullah said.
Their plan is to provide iPads that are equipped with the questionnaire and other toolkit resources to the providers. Through this method, the team will be able to see how often the questionnaire is used.
“We are very thankful for this grant because I do think we are saving lives,” Dr. Abdullah said. “Any little thing that we can do to improve the outcomes of these patients who have a rare but difficult-to-treat disease—it’s crucial. This gives us the ability to reach out and help patients who are out of our physical bounds.”
Diagnosing ILD among underrepresented minority populations in Chicago
Dr. Kavitha Selvan is conducting her quality improvement research project at the University of Chicago, alongside her team.
“The community we serve in South Chicago houses a significant number of underrepresented [minority populations],” she said.
“We know that Black patients with ILD experience higher rates of hospitalization, compared with White patients,” she said. “And they are hospitalized, require lung transplants, and die at a younger age too.”
In clinical practice, Dr. Selvan has noticed a trend of patients being referred for evaluation of possible ILD later and later. In some cases, several years go by before the appropriate work for ILD is initiated, and that valuable time lost leads to irreversible loss of lung function.
Dr. Selvan’s plan is to partner with primary care providers who are seeing these patients first in order to expedite the work-up and referral of ILD when appropriate and, ultimately, reduce the amount of time that passes between symptom onset and definitive diagnosis.
“To me, this grant and the resources it provided represented an important opportunity to improve outcomes in the high-risk patients we care for through early disease recognition and treatment,” she said.
Dr. Selvan’s project began with educating members of the Primary Care Group at UChicago on risk factors and exam findings that may suggest ILD in patients coming to clinic with nonspecific respiratory complaints. Then they had to equip providers with the ILD Clinician Toolkit and reach patients by handing out the patient questionnaire in primary care clinic.
The next step for this project is going to be dissecting the answers to a postintervention survey that was sent out to understand the practices and comfort of primary care providers in evaluating suspected ILD and the utility of the additional resources created by Dr. Selvan’s team.
“My hope is that we can utilize this partnership with the Primary Care Group to provide the education that’s needed both on the patient side and the provider side, like knowing not to ignore respiratory symptoms, knowing which patients warrant ILD-specific testing, and knowing what the appropriate tests are. In doing so, we can get patients into ILD clinic earlier, confirm their diagnosis, and get them initiated on the appropriate therapies sooner,” she said.
Dr. Selvan credits the quality improvement grant as being fundamental in her success as a fellow and early faculty at UChicago Medicine and believes that this project has created a culture of awareness that wouldn’t have been possible without funding.
“I truly believe that early detection and risk factor modification is the most critical aspect of interstitial lung disease care, and the mechanism for how we’re going to actually improve patient outcomes in our community,” Dr. Selvan said. “Building the infrastructure to accomplish that requires time, resources, and support from institutions and philanthropic foundations that believe in that mission too."
Opportunities like this are made possible by generous contributions from our donors. Make a gift to CHEST and select “Clinical Research” to help aid future research into interstitial lung disease and much more.