Transitional care for patients with IBD focuses on efforts to successfully transfer care from pediatric to adult providers while encouraging the assumption of health care responsibility. As 25% of patients will be diagnosed with IBD before the age of 18 years, many will undergo this process. Efforts to enhance this process have included transition clinics and other means to improve patient comfort with transition and develop the skill of health care self-management. Currently, most pediatric practitioners provide transition care with informal education and emphasize independence without formal programs. A variety of tools to assess transition readiness have been developed. Given the varied disease process, often varied and subjective outcomes, and lack of studies such as randomized controlled trials, further data are necessary to determine the best avenue to transition and assess outcomes. Critically relevant to providing adequate care to transitioning patients includes understanding the development of self-management skills and the developmental processes relevant to young adults with IBD. Transition represents an area for quality improvement, and although progress has been made in recognition and promotion of transition practices, future directions in research will allow improved understanding of the evidence-based practices and needs of these individuals to further enhance their care.

Crohn’s disease (CD) is a chronic illness that affects both the pediatric and adult populations with an increasing worldwide prevalence. We aim to identify a large, single-center cohort of patients with CD using natural language processing (NLP) in combination with codified data and extract surgical rates and medication usage from the electronic medical record (EMR). Patients with CD were identified from the entire Cleveland Clinic EMR using ICD codes and CD-specific terms identified by NLP to fit a logistic regression model. Cohorts were developed for pediatric-onset (younger than 18 years) and adult-onset (18 years and older) CD. Surgeries were identified using current procedural terminology (CPT) codes and NLP. Crohn’s disease–related medications were extracted using physician orders in the EMR. Patients with pediatric-onset (n = 2060) and adult-onset (n = 4973) CD were identified from 2000 to 2017 with a positive predictive value of 98.5%. Rate of CD-related abdominal surgery over time was significantly higher in adult-onset compared with pediatric-onset CD (10-year surgery rate 49.9% vs 37.7%, respectively; P < 0.001). Treatment with biologics was significantly higher in pediatric vs adult-onset CD cohorts (63.6% vs 49.2%; P < 0.001). The overall rate of CD-related abdominal surgery was significantly higher in those who received <6 months of a biologic compared with ≥6 months of a biologic for both cohorts (pediatric 64.1% vs 39.1%, P ≤ 0.001; adult 69.3% vs 56.5%, P ≤ 0.001). Additionally, 60.9% in pediatric-onset CD and 43.5% in adult-onset CD treated with ≥6 months of biologic therapy have not required abdominal surgery. On multivariable analysis, perianal surgery was a significant risk factor for abdominal surgery in both cohorts. We used a combination of codified and NLP data to establish the largest, North American, single-center EMR cohort of pediatric- and adult-onset CD patients and determined that biologics are associated with lower rates of surgery over time, potentially altering the natural history of the disease.

Early identification of Crohn’s disease (CD) patients at risk for complications could enable targeted surgical referral, but routine magnetic resonance enterography (MRE) has not been definitively correlated with need for surgery. Our objective was to identify computer-extracted image (radiomic) features from MRE associated with risk of surgery in CD and combine them with clinical and radiological assessments to predict time to intervention. This was a retrospective single-center pilot study of CD patients who had an MRE within 3 months prior to initiating medical therapy. Radiomic features were extracted from annotated terminal ileum regions on MRE and combined with clinical variables and radiological assessment (via Simplified Magnetic Resonance Index of Activity scoring for wall thickening, edema, fat stranding, ulcers) in a random forest classifier. The primary endpoint was high- and low-risk groups based on need for surgery within 1 year of MRE. The secondary endpoint was time to surgery after treatment. Eight radiomic features capturing localized texture heterogeneity within the terminal ileum were significantly associated with risk of surgery within 1 year of treatment (P < .05); yielding a discovery cohort area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of 0.67 (n = 50) and validation cohort area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of 0.74 (n = 23). Kaplan-Meier analysis of radiomic features together with clinical variables and Simplified Magnetic Resonance Index of Activity scores yielded the best hazard ratio of 4.13 (P = (7.6 × 10^-6) and concordance index of 0.71 in predicting time to surgery after MRE. Radiomic features on MRE may be associated with risk of surgery in CD, and in combination with clinicoradiological scoring can yield an accurate prognostic model for time to surgery.