2017 Annual Update

ImproveCareNow is a collaborative community where clinicians, researchers, parents, patients, and improvers are empowered to learn and continuously improve to bring about more reliable, proactive IBD care, and healthier children and youth. We are pleased to share our Annual Update, which includes highlights and achievements from 2017 and plans for our continued work to improve care and health for kids with IBD in 2018 and beyond.

In 2017 ImproveCareNow:

• celebrated Our First Decade

• welcomed 14 new centers, including all nine pediatric IBD programs in Belgium, expanding our network to include 106 centers with 29,400 patients and 1,200 clinicians, including 945 pediatric gastroenterologists
• carried out important work supported by a $1 million from the Clare Foundation to study and implement methods to empower patients, and an award of $2.5 million from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Center Institute (PCORI), for a study of the effectiveness of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet in Crohn’s disease, using a novel investigative method called “n of 1” or personalized trials
• received research funding, from AbbVie, Takeda and Celgene, which is supporting collaborative studies using data from ImproveCareNow centers that have been entered into the ImproveCareNow registry
• benefited from valuable funding from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, to enable patients and parents to attend our Community Conferences and to reduce the cost for centers to attend
• received, via the ImproveCareNow Research Committee, an additional 8 proposals for research—29 studies are underway or have been completed and another 4 are under consideration
• recorded 4 ImproveCareNow research publications in medical journals, 7 published abstracts, 3 oral presentations at a national research meeting and 3 poster presentations
• celebrated record attendance at our 2016 community conferences, which brought together a total of 634 registrants, a 6% increase over 2016, despite a major hurricane in September that kept our friends and colleagues in Florida from attending

As the ImproveCareNow community continues to work together through 2018 and beyond, the journey promises to be full of exciting discovery, improvement and innovation, as we:

• develop a program to meet the needs of families when they first learn their child has Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis
• expand our research program to learn more about inflammatory bowel disease
• enhance our communications program for more effective sharing including patients and parents. 

Read the full 2017 Annual Update

We believe all children and youth with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis should be cared for at an ImproveCareNow center, where 81% of patients are in clinical remission (feeling well and fully active), 90% have satisfactory nutrition, 93% have satisfactory growth and 94% are not taking steroids.

We invite everyone interested in supporting our work, in getting kids with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis better right now, to join ImproveCareNow

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Related links:

2016 Annual Update

2015 Annual Update