Large proportion of service users of trueNorth, Casel’s addiction medicine program, were in need of hepatitis C treatment. When supporting these individuals, it became clear that a high percentage of them were facing various economic, social and institutional barriers, such as homelessness and unstable housing, food insecurity, and social isolation. These challenges limited their access to hepatitis C treatment within their communities, as existing programs were typically heavily regimented. Individuals unable to meet the traditional programs strict and structured requirements were not offered treatment. To put this into perspective, trueNorth had over 400 service users in need of hepatitis C treatment at the time, but less than 1% of these people had ever received treatment at a traditional hepatitis C program.
Since existing hepatitis C programs were failing to meet the needs of our service user population, we piloted our own hepatitis C program, PATHOntario. We made sure to transfer the lessons learned from trueNorth. In less than a year, PATHOntario was launched and offered to all of our affiliate sites.
Service users and providers are always surprised to hear that our hepatitis C program offers same-day assessment and treatment, without the need for an appointment or a referral. For comparison, our earlier approach of referring our service users to existing “off-site” hepatitis C programs resulted in less than 1% of these individuals being offered treatment. With Casel’s innovative telemedicine based model of care, 100% of our service users are now being offered screening. Better yet, 80% of these individuals are actually taking us up on that offer and getting the treatment they need and deserve.