Hired in 2021 and in 2023 named associate vice chair of pediatric to adult transitional care for the University of Colorado Department of Surgery, Dan Wood has maintained a career-long interest in helping older adolescent patients make the transition to adult care.
The “warm handoff” between pediatric providers who may have been caring for the patient since childhood and their new adult doctors is key to the patient’s ability to successfully navigate their new care, he says.
Wood, an adolescent and reconstructive urologist and professor of urology in the CU School of Medicine, in February co-led Bridging the Gap, a conference he conceived to convene and educate providers across the CU Anschutz Medical Campus on topics around transition of care.
Wood and conference co-organizer Eleanor Comfort, MD, assistant professor of internal medicine, welcomed more than 80 physicians, advanced practice providers, trainees, and administrators to share their clinics’ strategies for transition and to learn from national and international transitional care experts. Specialties represented included urology, gastroenterology, cardiothoracic surgery, neurology, transplant surgery, family medicine, gynecology, and more.
We sat down with Wood to talk about the conference and some of the biggest challenges in transitional care.