The medical center is proud to be the only Adult Cystic Fibrosis Specialty Center in East Tennessee. Clay Callison, MD, directs this treatment and research program. Most of our patients make their transition from pediatric care at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital (ETCH) in their late teens. The medical center partners with ETCH to provide a smooth transition. Program Growth
The last year saw continued growth in our Adult Cystic Fibrosis Program as we have continued to graduate patients from our pediatric center as well as capture new patients who have moved to our region. With this growth, we have evaluated our current clinic processes for patient monitoring, especially as many of these patients live farther and farther from our center.
We have continued to embrace home spirometry as a cornerstone to our remote patient evaluations and have continued to expand the use of telehealth for our patients, both on a routine basis as well as for acute evaluations. We recently began a focused effort on abdominal ultrasound screening for liver disease, which has seen significant success. We continue optimizing this process through close interaction with radiology and by including the APRI calculation in our annual lab process. This indentifies those patients who need to travel to a hepatology center, since we do not have a board-certified hepatologist in East Tennessee. In 2023, Lindsay A. Samarin joined our team in preparation for the retirement of our longest tenured nurse practitioners in 2024. We plan to continue our work on social determinants of health to identify patients who need additional assistance, as we look to expand our screening process across our organization in 2024 beyond food insecurity. Awards National CFF Conference Poster Presentation November 2023 “Area Deprivation Index and Cystic Fibrosis Care Delivery: Data from the Tennessee and Mississippi Cystic Fibrosis Consortium.”
Program Patient Growth
140
120
100
125
80
121
107
96
82
87
60
99
74
58
40
66
20
24
20
20
19
19
18
15
16
11
12
0
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
Existing Patients
New Patients
28 | HLVI Annual Report
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