Patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) often face many concerns, fears and uncertainties that render “treatment decision making very difficult,” says Jasvinder Singh, MD, MPH, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Often these patients, who tend to be women from minority groups, “do not have access to easily understandable…
EULAR 2023—It is not enough to practice medicine by the book; rather, communication with patients and understanding their goals for patients are vital to high-quality care. At EULAR 2023, the session titled The Promise of Health Literacy in Clinical Care provided a treasure trove of insights for many clinicians. Definitions & Actions The first speaker…
Recently, the Vasculitis Foundation, in collaboration with a group of physicians and vasculitis investigators in the U.S. and Latin America (i.e., Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Argentina), launched an educational series of videos in Spanish called, Aprendiendo de Vasculitis. “The goal of these videos is to provide education to all Spanish-speaking patients,” explains Sebastian E….
It was a delight to read the comments in the May 2019 issue of The Rheumatologist on a paper by Hirsch and colleagues, discussing how health literacy affects the patient global assessment.1,2 Patient-driven outcome measures (PROs), patient global assessment on a visual analog scale (VAS) or a numeric rating scale (NRS), a segmented numeric version…
For RA patients, a low score on the patient global assessment of disease activity as measured by a visual analog scale (PGA-VAS) is necessary to confirm remission. However, limited patient health literacy combined with the complexity of the scale may result in discrepancies between the PGA-VAS and provider assessments of disease activity. New research examined the patient perspective on the PGA-VAS and its connections to health literacy and disease state…
PHRs offer time-saving, communication perks for patients and physicians, but may pose health literacy challenges