ARP Year in Review: Updates in Advanced Practice, Epidemiology & Rehabilitation

She encouraged audience members to visit the ACR legislation action website to learn more about efforts to get legislation passed to support continuous telehealth.

“Each of us, whether we are advanced practice providers or other individuals in the care of patients with rheumatic diseases, really play important roles” in many aspects of rheumatology, such as recruiting more students into the field; having a hand in models of care development, implementation and evaluation; or working on guidelines and legislation, Dr. Belza said.

Epidemiology

Dr. Hannan

Always remember that patients are the reason for research, advised Marian Hannan, DSc, MPH, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior scientist of the Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew SeniorLife, Boston.

Dr. Hannan reviewed several papers related to epidemiology and highlighted a study that drove home the message that patient involvement improves and changes research. The authors pointed out that every patient partner brings a different set of experiences, skills and perspective.

“So, what you get from one person you may not be getting from another person but recognizing that and recognizing the input from all players on the team is really key,” noted Dr. Hannan.

The days of tokenism that ignores patient input should be a thing of the past, she said. “In my view that’s sort of where current research is and we need to change this,” she said.

Dr. Hannan called for a paradigm shift toward better patient involvement because, as the authors note, it improves many aspects of research, including how it is disseminated and actually put into practice. “This paper did a great job of talking about how to do that in a positive way as opposed to saying shame on us for the way that we’ve done it for decades and we need to improve.”

Another article she presented revealed a detailed analysis of health records from a large United Kingdom dataset that showed adults over 65 years old who took acetaminophen had more adverse events, such as ulcerations and bowel perforations, than those who didn’t.¹ This finding is something rheumatologists may want to consider when discussing choices of pain medicine with patients, she said.

On the topic of osteoarthritis (OA), a study in Canada highlighted how the disease is often overlooked in younger adults, especially people who had symptoms when they were under the age of 35.² They had longer time to diagnosis even though they had the same symptoms compared with people who had later onset or later recognition of their OA, Dr. Hannan said.