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…
(Reuters Health)—Symptoms that patients describe to doctors may not always be documented in electronic medical records, a small U.S. study suggests. To test out how well the records match reality, researchers compared symptoms that 162 patients checked off on paper-based questionnaires with the information entered in patients’ electronic charts at eye clinics. Roughly one-third of…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—A friendly, but stern, voice talks to Joseph Kvedar, MD, vice president of Connected Health at Partners HealthCare, from his smartphone. Dr. Kvedar has just woken up. “Good morning, Joe! Here’s the tale of the tape. Your blood pressure and cholesterol are fine. Your sleep deficit is now up to three hours for the week….