Advocacy efforts in the medical profession are evolving as technology evolves. The rise of social media, in particular, has brought about great change in the way organizations, such as the ACR, interact with Congress. At the 2017 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting, Nov. 3–8 in San Diego, former Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.) will discuss how to continue…
It’s a bit ironic that when injured people are in pain—and their mobility is reduced—they are often expected to travel to a physical therapy clinic. For millions of people, such trips are a burden. In Australia, however, some patients are “letting movement come to them.” Novel research from The University of Melbourne shows that taking…
MADRID—Determining what is a best practice in rheumatology and then implementing improvements based on what you find can be fraught with complexity, an expert said during the 2017 Annual European Congress on Rheumatology (EULAR). Examples are emerging of benchmarking projects in which electronic registers are used to improve patient care, said William Dixon, MD, chair…
(Reuters Health)—Some cancer doctors use Twitter to promote drugs manufactured by companies that pay them, but they almost never disclose their conflicts of interest on the social media platform, a new study shows. “This is a big problem,” says senior author Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. “Doctors…
As medical professionals, we understand the impact quality research can have on how we care for our patients. The extensive adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has enabled the collection of big data in rheumatology. This has provided a new and unique opportunity for the rheumatology community to conduct in-depth research into how patients are…
Social media has revolutionized my practice. I stay current with Twitter content from other rheumatologists, patient organizations and medical journals. I am also an active member of the international Twitter-based rheumatology journal club, #RheumJC. Still, I was recently surprised when my patient’s name appeared in a friend request. This same patient was following me on…
The presence of synovial monosodium urate monohydrate (MSU) crystals is the gold standard for diagnosing gout. But a new study, funded in part by the ACR and led by rheumatologists, including Alexis Ogdie, MD, MSCE, evaluated the effectiveness of ultrasound in diagnosing it. The study found that ultrasound can be useful in discriminating gout from non-gout….
NEW YORK (Reuters Health—Telemedicine follow up based on patient-reported outcome (PRO) is noninferior to conventional outpatient care for tight control of disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients with low disease activity or remission, new findings show. “Even though patients in the [telemedicine] follow-up groups requested more acute visits, they over-all had a more than…
Electronic health records enable researchers to access significant amounts of patient data, but identifying subjects with a specific condition can be difficult. In a recent study, researchers successfully designed three algorithms to identify patients with SLE, incorporating multiple counts of the ICD-9 code, laboratory testing, medication data and keywords. In the future, these algorithms may successfully transfer to other systems to aid research…
Brain imaging can distinguish fibromyalgia patients from healthy controls with high sensitivity and specificity, according to two papers published nearly simultaneously in Pain late last summer, by groups at the Universities of Colorado and Michigan, respectively. Somewhat surprisingly to the authors and others, in the Colorado study, which used both painful and nonpainful stimuli, the…