Doctors and patient advocates urged the rheumatology community to address the drastic inadequacies in care faced by marginalized people in a session held at ACR Convergence 2024.
The Biases We Don’t Know We Hold
Implicit bias can affect patient care at the physician level when they’re making treatment decisions and at the healthcare organization level when they’re choosing new hires. Here are insights into strategies rheumatologists can use to become aware of, and question, their implicit biases.
Striving for Equity
SAN DIEGO—At ACR Convergence 2023, panelists provided guidance for reducing disparities and improving health equity for patients who are negatively impacted by social determinants of health.
Ethics Forum: Thoughts on Managing Electronic Communication with Patients
Recent proposals in the U.S. to bill for electronic communication with our patients could be seen as a refreshing but contested attempt to battle burnout rates in the present era. A fee for electronic communications between patients and clinicians also acknowledges the value of the clinician’s time and expertise. But is this ethical? Discussion Burnout…
Benefits & Challenges of, & Potential Solutions for, Hybrid Conferences
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific and medical conferences began to be canceled or postponed. Later, once the pandemic endured beyond the scope of weeks to months, many organizations shifted conferences to a virtual format. Now, as the federal government has ended the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, effective mitigation measures, including vaccination, rapid testing, masking…
Rheuminations: Why I Don’t Use the Term ‘Stakeholder’
Modern healthcare is, for better or for worse, the hybrid of many different fields—some that are expected, such as biomedical science, and others that are less well appreciated, such as astrology and palmistry. One modern contributor to healthcare is management. Nowadays, we’re inundated with all sorts of jargon from the business and policy worlds: turnover,…
Is ‘Resilience’ a Positive Descriptive or an Insidious Bias?
Resilience. That word has been living rent free in my head for the past three weeks. And rent free is a bit of understatement. It all began at the end of a very productive clinic, when the trainee and I sat down to discuss our reflections on the interactions with patients that we’d had in…
Healthcare Insiders Warn of New Technologies’ Impacts on Patient Care
Patient advocates, researcher-clinicians and academic leaders are calling for closer scrutiny of new technologies applied within healthcare, citing concerns about a lack of consideration for how they may affect patient care.
The Gender Gap in Rheumatology Awards
Women are substantially under-represented among the recipients of major awards in rheumatology, according to a 2022 study by Halling et al., which looked at the gender award gap in North America and Europe over the past two decades.1 This trend is also seen in other fields, with only one woman winning the Fields Medal in…
Overcoming Healthcare Disparity
PHILADELPHIA—Quality improvement (QI) tools in pediatric rheumatology can help overcome health outcome disparities that are based on race, gender identity, income and other factors, experts said in a session at ACR Convergence. With it well established that these disparities exist, it’s time to begin eliminating them, said Emily Smitherman, MD, MS, assistant professor of pediatric…