BOSTON – ED-based screening is a feasible method of detecting hepatitis C virus (HCV) in high-risk populations, but linkage to care remains low, according to investigators.
Will Pass/MDedge News
Dr. Charles S. Landis
An HCV screening program involving three Seattle hospitals and more than 4,000 patients showed that linkage to care was lowest among patients who were younger, homeless, or used injection drugs, reported lead author Charles S. Landis, MD, PhD, of the University of Washington, Seattle.
“In the U.S., rates of acute HCV infections are increasing in younger patients and in areas disproportionally affected by the opiate epidemic,” Dr. Landis said in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. “In order to achieve a goal of elimination, HCV screening, appropriate linkage to care, and treatment will need to be directed toward younger, marginalized, and underserved populations.”
Dr. Landis explained that EDs are suitable for HCV screening because users of emergency services are disproportionately affected by HCV, compared with patients in primary and specialty care settings. Despite this, linkage to care remains historically higher in primary and specialty care settings at approximately 70%, compared with 30% via the ED, Dr. Landis said.
Historically, EDs have been resistant to HCV screening programs, Dr. Landis said, but with the model used in the present study, which relied upon a full-time staff member in each ED who was employed by the infectious disease or hepatology department, no ED resources were needed.
Participants were willing adults who had reliable contact information. Patients were excluded if they were non–English speaking, incarcerated, enrolled or expected to enroll in another clinical study which excludes coenrollment, planned to move out of the region in the next 6 months, admitted to the ED with an acute life-threatening illness, or admitted to the ED for sexual assault. The program had three objectives: Screening, linkage to care, and treatment, all of which were coordinated by the aforementioned case manager.
To date, 4,182 patients have been screened, 936 have been enrolled, 95 have tested positive for HCV RNA, 32 have been linked with care, and 19 have been treated.
“So you can see, a lot of squeeze for a just a little bit of juice here,” Dr. Landis said, referring to the relatively low number of treated patients, compared with how many were screened.
The prevalence of HCV infection based on RNA testing was 2%, though one hospital had a rate of 5%. “This [prevalence] compares to, but is maybe slightly less than, the prevalence seen in others studies based in the emergency department,” Dr. Landis said. “The thought is, not all emergency departments are equal in terms of the patient population that they serve.”
Data analysis showed that the overall linkage to care was 36%. “This is still suboptimal, from my perspective,” Dr. Landis said, “but it does compare with several other ED-based studies.”
A closer look at the data showed that linkage was not uniform across the population. Among patients with homes, linkage to care was 59%, compared with 20% for patients who were homeless (P = .02).
“Ultimately, we need to tailor our approaches for linking homeless patients differently than patients who are not homeless,” Dr. Landis said.
Patients who reported no injection-drug use had a linkage to care of 50%, which was numerically higher than the rate of 20% among users of injection drugs; this difference was not statistically significant, which Dr. Landis attributed to insufficient population size. Similarly, younger patients showed numerical trends toward lower linkage to care.
“Future work will attempt to optimize linkage to care strategies based on patient demographic factors, such as active injection drug use or homelessness,” Dr. Landis said.
During discussion, a conference attendee from the United States expressed skepticism of the program’s merits.
“I may be a glass-half-empty person, but is it worth all this effort?” the attendee asked. “In all honesty, you treated a few dozen [patients] for 180,000 visits [per year]. I’m really not sure it’s worth those efforts, and I’m wondering if those efforts could be placed in different areas, especially for a higher yield.”
“Point well taken,” Dr. Landis said. “I think that was the purpose of the study, to see if the emergency department is a place to screen and link patients to care, and we’re trying to optimize that. Remember, there were 4,000 patients, but for many of those, it took literally a minute to screen them.”
An attendee from Australia offered a slightly more positive take on the findings, followed by a suggestion to improve linkage in marginalized populations.
“I’m not sure I’d be pessimistic,” the attendee said. “I think you ought to be commended for getting that number of people to link, because it is very difficult when we are looking at linking people from a hospital-based setting who actually live in the community and suffer from homelessness and mental health issues and incarceration and a whole range of other things. ... Maybe we need to change our idea of having these centralized silos where people are referred, and go out into the community, much like [tuberculosis] clinics used to do, and track people down.”
The study was funded by Gilead. The investigators disclosed additional relationships with HighTide Therapeutics, Intercept, AbbVie, and others.
SOURCE: Landis CS et al. The Liver Meeting 2019, Abstract 168.