A majority of state legislatures have concluded their work for 2016. The ACR’s state advocacy efforts continued to focus on policy benefiting rheumatologists and patients alike. The two dominant issues this year were biosimilar substitution and step therapy. Biosimilar Substitution Biosimilar substitution remains the most prevalent issue throughout the states. The ACR continues to monitor…
Level 3 Established Patient E&M Visit A 43-year-old patient is seen in the office for a follow-up visit of her RF-positive rheumatoid arthritis and primary osteoarthritis of the left knee. The patient is on sulindac, methotrexate and folic acid. At her last visit, the patient’s methotrexate dose was increased, which has greatly reduced her pain….
A passion to improve the clinical reasoning skills of future doctors led Maria Dall’Era, MD, associate professor of medicine and director of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Lupus Clinic, to create a revolutionary application for smartphones and tablets that could modernize medical education. With funding from the Rheumatology Research Foundation’s Clinician Scholar Educator…
The ACR has been at the forefront of helping rheumatologists meet practice demands, including federal reporting requirements. The first registry that helped meet these requirements was the Rheumatology Clinical Registry (RCR), and it facilitated quality reporting, but required manual entry of required data. More recently, ACR has contracted with FIGmd to create a tool that…
Where can you network with more than 16,000 professionals in the field of rheumatology? Where you can hear about promising research and best practices from industry leaders? How can you find out about new treatments and technologies on the horizon? You guessed it—at the 2016 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting, to be held Nov. 11–16. As if…
Can We Stay Forever Young? May your heart always be joyful And may your song always be sung May you stay forever young Forever Young —Bob Dylan Beneath the rubric of orphan diseases reside some rare conditions and others that are extraordinarily uncommon. These are the diseases that most physicians either never to get to…
In three clinical trials, ixekizumab proved more effective than placebo or etanercept at increasing the work attendance and productivity of patients with plaque psoriasis…
(Reuters)—Mesoblast Ltd. on Monday said its experimental stem-cell treatment led to significant improvements of symptoms and disease activity in patients whose rheumatoid arthritis had stopped being helped by widely used biotech medicines, according to data from a mid-stage trial. Treatment with the Australian company’s mesenchymal precursor cell (MPC) product, MPC-300-IV, was deemed well tolerated with…
(Reuters Health)—In states that expanded either their Medicaid programs or private insurance options for low-income Americans, beneficiaries used more outpatient and preventive care and less emergency care. They also had better subjective overall health, compared with low-income residents of states with no expanded coverage. All states participate in Medicaid, a partnership with the federal government…
A recent study documented blood transcriptional profiles in pediatric patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), finding that plasmablast signatures were the most robust biomarker of SLE disease activity. Researchers were further able to stratify patients into groups on the basis of molecular correlates, which may aid in personalizing SLE treatment and identifying biomarkers that can predict occurrence and frequency of flares…