Opinion Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2023. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Surg. Jun 27, 2023; 15(6): 1007-1019
Published online Jun 27, 2023. doi: 10.4240/wjgs.v15.i6.1007
Diverticulitis is a population health problem: Lessons and gaps in strategies to implement and improve contemporary care
Stephanie Lee Stovall, Jennifer A Kaplan, Joanna K Law, David R Flum, Vlad V Simianu
Stephanie Lee Stovall, Jennifer A Kaplan, Vlad V Simianu, Department of Surgery, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, Seattle, WA 98101, United States
Joanna K Law, Department of Gastroenterology, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, Seattle, WA 98101, United States
David R Flum, Department of Surgery, University of Washington Medical, Seattle, WA 98195, United States
Author contributions: Stovall SL and Simianu VV conceptualized the opinion review, conducted the literature search, analyzed/interpreted the literature, and drafted the index manuscript; Kaplan JA, Law JK, Flum DR, and Simianu VV critically revised the manuscript for important intellectual content and language quality; and all authors reviewed the manuscript and approved the final version.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Vlad V Simianu, MD MPH, FACS, FASCRS, Director, Surgeon, Department of Surgery, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, 1100 9th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101, United States. vlad.simianu@commonspirit.org
Received: January 27, 2023
Peer-review started: January 27, 2023
First decision: March 14, 2023
Revised: April 10, 2023
Accepted: April 24, 2023
Article in press: April 24, 2023
Published online: June 27, 2023
Processing time: 138 Days and 12.9 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Diverticulitis-associated hospitalization and colectomy are costly and have increased over the past decade, despite professional society guidelines advocating for outpatient management and individualized decisions about surgery. These trends raise flags about how to best measure guideline-concordant clinical practice in the modern era. Strategies to improve guideline-concordant care may consist of improved population-level data in diverticulitis care, regionalization of care, and system wide quality improvement initiatives for guideline implementation.