Improving HS Care: Early Detection, Awareness, and Reasons for Optimism

In "Improving HS Care: Early Detection, Awareness, and Reasons for Optimism," our expert looks ahead at what would change the course of the disease.

Dr. Lev-Tov returns to Jessica, the 14-year-old who wakes up with her first lesion on a Tuesday before school. He asks what the healthcare system, physicians, and pharmacy managers can do to make the right diagnosis and deliver treatment at the right time.

His answer begins with communication and mindset. HS is a disease, and clinicians need to hunt for it aggressively, including with AI tools that can scan charts across the healthcare system and flag the diagnosis faster than a human can. Those findings can then reach decision makers quickly.

He also wants to educate the house of medicine first and the public second. He would love to see a public health campaign explaining that HS affects one in every hundred people in the United States, and how many lose jobs, relationships, and the life they could have had.

If legislators, health insurers, and pharmacy benefit managers knew about HS, he says, managing the disease would be much easier.

Dr. Lev-Tov is nonetheless optimistic, because HS has never been in a better situation than today. Since the advent of advanced therapies, there has been a flood of investment and attention. For the first time, the NIH is funding HS research, thanks largely to the HS Foundation. Ten years ago, NIH funding was a big fat zero.

Drugs are coming to market and the pipeline is loaded. He hopes for innovation in surgery and wound care, since a good dressing can change daily quality of life. He wants pharmacy managers and others to be passionate about catching HS early, stopping it from derailing a life, and making more efficient dollar decisions.