A Call to Action to Use the Pandemic to Transform Rheumatic Disease Care

How We Get There

The development of many of these innovations is dependent on the availability of research funding to demonstrate that they improve patient outcomes and to assess feasibility and cost effectiveness. As the largest private funding source for rheumatology research and training in the U.S., the Rheumatology Research Foundation is dedicated to providing funding for highly innovative ideas that advance treatment options, improve care and impact the lives of the 54 million Americans living with rheumatic disease.

In our most recent fiscal year, the Foundation distributed almost $11 million in grant awards focused on research and workforce development within the field of rheumatology. Amid the economic crisis accompanying the global pandemic, the Foundation intends to fund grant applications to explore the relationships between COVID-19 and rheumatic and musculo­skeletal disease (see Notice of Special Interest).

Let’s work together to provide hope and action, and make the COVID-19 pandemic a watershed moment rather than a lost opportunity to transform care for patients with rheumatic diseases.

S. Louis Bridges Jr., MD, PhD, president of the Rheumatology Research Foundation, is the former director of the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine and has been named physician in chief and chair of the Department of Medicine at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and chief of the Division of Rheumatology at HSS and Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, effective Sept. 1.