Mission

Improve Care Now is dedicated to improving the quality of healthcare provided to children and adolescents with Crohn’s Disease and ulcerative colitis, and to improving health of these young patients.

To achieve this mission, we must:

Establish effective collaboration among care professionals, patients and families to freely share information, experience, tools and results related to the treatment of these diseases.
Make medical quality improvement technology available to all doctors and care providers who provide care to these patients, and with them, to all patients.
Use the alliance’s quality improvement technology to identify gaps between our Model Care Guideline and the care actually being received by patients, and to close any such gaps.
Use the combined experience of the alliance to refine, improve and consistently apply the alliance’s Model Care protocol for all patients.

Through these efforts we will enable doctors and other care providers to provide the best care possible, and enable patients to get the care they want and deserve. And together we will help more patients to get their disease into remission and prevent relapses.

Goals for Patients

In addition to the broad goals described above, the Improve Care Now alliance has set the following goals for helping patients:

Achieve reduced overall disease activity
Achieve normal growth
Achieve an excellent quality of life
Avoid complications of their diseases
Avoid medication side effects
Set and achieve goals for maintaining their health

Goals for Health Care Providers

Improve Care Now has also set these goals for participating physicians and care providers:

Appropriate diagnostic evaluation including appropriate disease staging prior to beginning treatment
During visits, patients will have nutritional and growth status evaluated and documented and an appropriate intervention initiated if needed
Practices will use the Improve Care Now population registry to recall patients at appropriate intervals and to track process and outcomes of care
Physicians will increase surveillance and safety for administration of medicines
Doctors will help families to set self-management goals
Patients will be adherent to effective medication therapy