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An official publication of the ACR and the ARP serving rheumatologists and rheumatology professionals

Coding Corner Question: Medical Chart Review of an Infliximab Infusion

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A 73-year-old female established patient with rheuma­toid arthritis affecting multiple joints and with positive rheumatoid factor returns to the office for an infliximab infusion. She denies any fevers, cough, dyspnea or concurrent illness. She has joint pain of 6 on the pain scale. She is on an NSAID, weekly methotrexate subcutaneous injections, folic acid and…

EHRs Play a Role in Physician Burnout

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A recently published research review notes physician burnout has become a crisis in the U.S. The authors describe how the added administrative tasks of electronic health records (EHRs) have contributed to the crisis, as well as how regulatory requirements and EHR platform design exacerbate the situation…

Larger Weight Loss Tied to Greater Improvements in Arthritic Knees

Lisa Rapaport  |  

(Reuters Health)—Obese people with knee osteoarthritis (OA) may find greater symptom relief when they lose larger amounts of weight, a recent study suggests. Researchers examined data on 240 obese adults with pain from knee OA who were participating in an 18-month experiment to see how diet alone or diet plus exercise affected their health. Participants…

Targeted Rheumatoid Arthritis Treatment Does Not Improve Mental Health

Will Boggs MD  |  

NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Effective pharmacotherapy of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is not associated with meaningful improvements in mental health, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis. “We were surprised by the small effect sizes for mental-health outcomes across all of the treatments included in this review, but particularly for the anti-TNF versus disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD)…

Lilly’s Lupus Treatment Succeeds in Mid-Stage Trial

Tamara Mathias  |  

(Reuters)—Eli Lilly & Co said its drug to treat autoimmune disease lupus met the main goal of a mid-stage trial, positioning the drugmaker to begin a bigger study later this year. The data come two weeks after U.S. health regulators approved the drug, baricitinib, under the trade name Olumiant, with a far more restrictive label…

U.S. Justice Department Says Obamacare Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

Reuters Staff  |  

WASHINGTON (Reuters)—The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Thursday that the part of Obamacare requiring individuals to have health insurance is unconstitutional, an unusual move that could lead to stripping away some of the most significant and popular parts of the law. In a brief filed in a federal court in Texas, the department…

Hip Bone Deterioration May Differ Significantly Between Men & Women

Marilynn Larkin  |  

NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Various image analysis techniques show sex-specific patterns of bone deterioration at the hip, suggesting that men and women should be assessed differently for hip fracture risk, researchers say. “One major contribution of this work is the integration of data-driven computational anatomy approaches, which showed that proximal femur fragility linked to fracture seems…

Fed Up with Rising Costs, Big U.S. Firms Dig Into Healthcare

Caroline Humer  |  

SAN JOSE, Calif., (Reuters)—At its Silicon Valley headquarters, network gear maker Cisco Systems Inc. is going to unusual lengths to take control of the relentless increase in its U.S. healthcare costs. The company is among a handful of large American employers who are getting more deeply involved in managing their workers’ health instead of looking…