Enabling rheumatology practices to use complex administration codes for biologic drugs is critical for maintaining patient access to essential therapies.
In 1916, a handful of conservation advocates successfully lobbied Congress to create the National Park Service, which now protects more than 85 million acres of U.S. land. Dedicated rheumatology advocacy has lasting effects, too, as evidenced by several policy wins in 2021 and efforts underway for 2022.
As chair of the Pediatric Rheumatology Special Committee, Colleen Correll, MD, MPH, is supporting efforts to increase the pediatric rheumatology workforce as a whole and pediatric rheumatology representation in the ACR.
States increasingly take the lead on issues critical to our members and the field of rheumatology, including copay accumulator bans, white bagging restrictions, prior authorization and drug pricing.
In January A&R, Simon et al. report a study to assess humoral and cellular immune responses after infection with, or vaccination against, SARS-CoV-2 in patients with B cell depletion and controls who are B cell competent, finding that B cell depletion completely blocks humoral but not T cell SARS-CoV-2 vaccination response. In the same issue, Connolly et al. evaluated disease flare and post-vaccination reactions in patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases following messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination.
The reassurance comes after ACR leadership sent a letter detailing how its prior authorization forms increased paperwork burden for many biologic drugs and hurt patients’ timely access to treatment.
Participation in the American Medical Association Relative Value Update Committee surveys contributes to the accurate valuation of rheumatology services.
A new law in Texas establishes a continuous prior authorization exemption for physicians who earn a 90% approval rate on prior authorization requests for a given service over a period of six months.
(Reuters Health)—It takes 12.4 months of bisphosphonate therapy to prevent one nonvertebral fracture per 100 postmenopausal women with osteoporosis, a meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials suggests.1 Researchers examined data on 10 randomized clinical trials with a total of 23,384 women who had an osteoporosis diagnosis based on either existing vertebral fractures or a bone mineral…