Dr. Jason Kim

As we kind of harped on, some of these patients have been on five, six medications for decades.

Years ago, when I first started practice was when they first started talking about the concept of an overactive bladder care pathway.

And that's when publications first started showing that the penetrance of the procedural interventions was like in the low single digits, right?

The ACWA study showed that was 2.9%.

And I said, this is a focus of my practice.

I'm doing way better than that.

And so what we decided to do is actually study this.

We introduced a care pathway at this point.

I looked a year before and a year after to see the improvements.

And even though I thought I was talking and getting patients to do a lot of procedural intervention, my rates at the time were about 7%, which was very good, but I couldn't believe they were so low.

And after we initiated a care pathway,

Our procedural intervention rates, I think, went to about 16%.

So they more than doubled.

But more importantly, we saw that the time to procedural intervention, we got in my practice down to six months from when they first came to us.

This was about 10 years ago.

I bet you if we look now, we're even more efficient.

And I think what we're doing is we're decluttering our practices of these patients from follow-ups for ineffective therapies.

So I do completely believe that earlier intervention leads to a significant cost savings.

You know what was interesting when we did our study, when we introduced the care pathway, is that another thing that we did was we started counseling patients, giving them the idea of procedural intervention from the first visit, meaning we'll try behavioral modification, we'll try medications.

If it doesn't work, don't worry.