The Challenges of Hepatitis B Clinical Care Within Underserved Communities

Individuals who contract hepatitis B are often living on the margins and may not be in a position to get the proper medical care needed. Fortunately, both new US federal and global guidelines are looking to address hepatitis B and get more people into the continuum of care. The overarching public health goals with the new hepatitis B guidelines are to make significant changes to HBV testing and clinical care including increasing vaccinations, extending universal screening to everyone at least once during a lifetime for all adults 18 years of age and older, reducing the number of new infections, and getting those patients who have contracted the disease the therapy to address their infections.

Debika Bhattacharya, MD MSc, clinical professor, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), believes the new universal hepatitis B screening guidelines is going to be a difference maker. “The universal screening guidelines that have been developed for hepatitis B are really going to help communities that don’t necessarily see physicians or have access to health care, even in the United States on a regular basis, because with the previous guidelines, you were asking risk-based questions and trying to risk stratify persons as to whether or not they needed Hepatitis B screening. Now we’re doing screening for everybody, so that allows us to serve more and to screen more.”

“We’re really hopeful that primary care providers can now take on hepatitis B care with the simpler guidelines,” said Su H. Wang, MD, MPH, FACP, medical director, Viral Hepatitis Programs & the Center for Asian Health at the Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center, RWJBarnabas Health. “So in lower resource countries, people are not going to easily able to easily find a hepatologist, or a GI doctor, or infectious disease doctor. And so we want to be able to empower frontline clinicians to be able to take on hepatitis B care.”

In the second installment of Contagion’s conversation with Bhattacharya and Wang discuss the new measures as well as the role of interdisciplinary collaboration in developing the guidelines.

To watch the first installment about hepatitis B guidelines, check out their interview here.