Hepatitis C Screenings Show Benefits to Patient Care
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 26, 2020) – A UK HealthCare emergency medicine doctor is being recognized for his work to implement hepatitis C screenings at the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital and UK Good Samaritan Hospital emergency departments.
Dr. Daniel J. Moore was named the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Young Investigator of the Year for his work on hepatitis C in the emergency department (ED). Moore is the assistant medical director of Emergency Medicine for UK HealthCare.
Moore established the non-targeted screening program in the UK HealthCare emergency departments in July 2018 through funding from Gilead Focus. The screening program tests every patient over the age of 18 who comes in for treatment for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) during their routine blood draw. Patients are informed of the additional test and are able to opt out, but Moore said so far, about 85% of patients agree to have their blood tested.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 2.4 million people in the United States are living with hepatitis C virus infection, which causes inflammation and damage to the liver. If left untreated, hepatitis C can have significant health impacts, like cirrhosis, scarring and liver cancer.
Since the program began more than two years ago in UK HealthCare hospitals, Moore said 42,000 patients have been screened. About 4,100 patients have tested HCV positive and nearly 50% of those patients have active or chronic infection.
Moore said the opioid epidemic has kept numbers steady, especially in the younger population. Hepatitis C is a bloodborne illness and as injection drug use continues to remain prevalent, the sharing of unclean needles has changed the most at-risk population from baby boomers to those born after 1965.
“This disease is nearly as common as hypertension,” Moore said. “We see that it has very serious personal and societal costs in this younger group of people.”
Treatment for hepatitis C consists of eight to 12 weeks of daily medication and has a near 100% cure rate, Moore said. It also has few, if any, side effects. Moore hopes this type of routinized, non-targeted screening becomes standard in places like emergency departments, where the prevalence of disease is high.
“We are starting to track treatment uptake and many of our patients, whom we identified as having hepatitis C virus, have begun and completed curative therapy,” he said. “Most of them were identified through this screening process in our ED.”
Moore has seen other benefits from this type of screening.
“The number of patients we have been able to link up to opioid use disorder education and treatment services is significant,” Moore said. “People want help and we can give it to them at our First Bridge Clinic, which specializes in opioid misuse treatment.”
Thanks to an alliance grant from the dean of the UK College of Medicine, Moore will continue his research in partnership with Jennifer Havens, a professor in the UK College of Medicine and faculty member in the Center on Drug and Alcohol Research (CDAR), and Dr. Roger Humphries, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine. The team is working to develop more streamlined methods of ED diagnosis and treatment uptake.
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