Photo Credit: Ekaterina Dorozhkina

Patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) who received care from an internal interdisciplinary family medicine team to attain sustained virologic response at 12 weeks after treatment (SVR12) had superior results compared with patients referred by external sources. For a study published in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, Jonathan Hughes, MD, and colleagues compared clinical outcomes for patients treated within a family medicine residency program with those referred to a specialist. In a single-center study of adults with HCV referred for treatment either internally or externally to a specialist, the number of patients with an SVR12 was the primary outcome. The study included 83 patients referred for treatment, 36 referred externally, and 47 treated internally. Although the SVR12 rate was 100% for both groups, the rate of SVR12 was 62% for patients treated internally and 31% for those referred externally when using an intention-to-treat analysis (relative risk 2.02, 95% CI, 1.18–3.47, P=0.01). According to the study team, this was entirely due to differences in follow-up rates.