During my year as president, we will embrace the theme of this year’s Annual Scientific Meeting – Precision Medicine in Allergy Practice. Our main goal is to educate allergists to improve their patients’ clinical outcomes. We are going to guide you in the application of very expensive new technologies and how they can be used to determine the phenotypes and endotypes in asthma and atopic dermatitis.
Following are just some of the ways we are looking ahead with precision.
We will continue to produce yardsticks. The atopic dermatitis yardstick will be published in the January issue of Annals. The pediatric severe asthma yardstick will be submitted for publication in early 2018. We have implemented a taskforce to determine the topics for future yardsticks.
In the area of practice management, we just launched a Prior Authorization Toolkit, which includes an appeal letter generator designed to ease your burden in responding with the information needed to get coverage. There are currently letters for Cinqair, Xolair and Dupixent. Teva Respiratory supported the development of this toolkit. We will work in 2018 to add letters covering more medications that require prior authorization.
We also just launched an Immunotherapy Shared Decision-Making Toolkit, supported by ALK. It includes a video that walks you through best practices and how to discuss treatment options with patients and guide them in a decision that will be a good fit for their values and attitudes. There is an online tool designed for the patient to use to guide them through the decision-making process. In 2018, we will be working on shared decision-making toolkits for adult and pediatric severe asthma and atopic dermatitis. These are all invaluable online resources to use in your practice.
A significant restructure of the 2018 Annual Scientific Meeting will allow attendees to participate in a wide variety of learning activities designed to improve clinical outcomes. Watch for more details on what to expect in the next few months.
I want you to know my door is always open. I want to talk to you, and I want to hear from you so we can address the issues that are important to you as we move forward.
Bradley E. Chipps, MD, FACAAI
ACAAI President
