The transition to ICD-10 is not just another yearly diagnosis codes update; it is a complete overhaul. This not only will affect providers, but also all payers, vendors and stakeholders are being affected by the expanded ICD-10 code sets through medical coding operations, software systems, reporting, administration, registration and more. With approximately 20 days before…
Teresa Fama: Rheumatologist to Chair Public Advisory Council Teresa Fama, MD, is the new chair of the New England Comparative Effectiveness Public Advisory Council (CEPAC). A rheumatologist who practices in Berlin, Vt., Dr. Fama has previous experience in public policy, specifically health policy. Before she began her second career as a physician, Dr. Fama was…
A presentation given during FOCIS 2015, the 15th annual meeting of the Federation of Clinical Immunity Societies in June 2015 in San Diego, focused on advances in stem cell research related to treatment of cancer and the function that particular enzymes play in disease. Anjana Rao, PhD, professor at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy…
The controversy over vitamin D is hearty enough to confuse even seasoned rheumatologists, says Nathan Wei, MD, The Arthritis Treatment Center, Frederick, Md. “It’s like what you hear with coffee. One week, [a study finds] coffee is … good for you; the next week, there’s a study saying it’s bad for you,” he says. Vitamin…
Summer is a season for travel, so if your immunocompromised patients plan to journey to regions where there are outbreaks of infections, such as chikungunya, tuberculosis, typhoid, yellow fever or other diseases, communication and preparation may prevent serious health events. “The world teems with disease-causing organisms, and almost every infection is more serious in the…
Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is an acquired, sporadic, autoimmune, connective tissue disease with two subsets: limited cutaneous scleroderma (lcSSc) and diffuse cutaneous scleroderma (dcSSc). In the U.S., the annual incidence is about 20 cases per 1 million adults, with a prevalence of about 240 cases per 1 million adults.1 As with other connective tissue disorders, SSc…
It takes a great deal of time and money to produce clinical practice guidelines for rheumatic diseases. No matter how well a treatment inhibits inflammatory cytokines, it won’t lower disease activity without one essential factor: patient compliance. “You can’t propose a treatment algorithm in your research that no patient would actually use,” says Veena Ranganath,…
People diagnosed with osteoporosis have almost twice the risk of developing hearing loss as those without the bone-fragile skeletal disease, according to results from a large retrospective study in Taiwan. The study looked at the risk of sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL) using data collected from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance claims and is believed to…
If Stephen Soloway, MD, FACP, FACR, CCD, wants to thank someone for his impressive baseball card collection, he may want to start with his mother. Recalling her taking him for baseball cards regularly, he went on to become the rare owner of every set of famed Topps, not to mention a few individual cards with…
Observation and research have confirmed that patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are at greater risk of cardiovascular disease than their peers of similar age and gender, and that traditional risk factors and chronic inflammation associated with RA apparently play a significant role in that risk. However, predicting which patients with rheumatoid arthritis are at greater…