The American College of Chest Physicians and Three Lakes Foundation recently announced a steering committee of experts in the fields of pulmonary medicine and primary care medicine working toward shortening the time to diagnosis for complex lung diseases.
Tejaswini Kulkarni, M.D., assistant professor and director of the Interstitial Lung Disease Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one of 10 physicians across the country selected to serve on the committee.
Composed of pulmonologists, primary care physicians and a nursing professional, the steering committee will work to create materials to reduce the time it takes to reach a diagnosis for interstitial lung diseases, like pulmonary fibrosis.
Starting with data-gathering surveys sent to both primary care physicians and pulmonologists, the committee will evaluate the findings to develop tools that can be used to aid in diagnosing complex lung diseases.
Affecting around 400,000 people in the United States, ILDs are a group of diseases that cause lung inflammation and/or permanent scars and are frequently misdiagnosed as more common lung diseases. Some studies show that reaching a proper diagnosis for rarer lung diseases can take upward of several years.