Monitoring chronic inflammatory musculoskeletal diseases mixing virtual and face-to-face assessments-Results of the digireuma study.

Mobile health technology holds great promise for the clinical management of patients with chronic disease. However, evidence on the implementation of projects involving digital health solutions in rheumatology is scarce. We aimed to study the feasibility of a hybrid (virtual and face-to-face) monitoring strategy for personalized care in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and spondyloarthritis (SpA). This project included the development of a remote monitoring model and its assessment. After a focus group with patients and rheumatologists, relevant concerns regarding the management of RA and SpA were raised, leading to the development of the Mixed Attention Model (MAM), which combined hybrid (virtual and face-to-face) monitoring. Then, a prospective study using the mobile solution Adhera for Rheumatology was conducted. Over a 3-month follow-up period, patients were given the opportunity to complete disease-specific electronic patient reported outcomes (ePROs) for RA and SpA with a pre-established frequency, as well as flares and changes in medication at any time. Number of interactions and alerts were assessed. The usability of the mobile solution was measured by the Net-Promoter Score (NPS) and through a 5-star Likert scale. Following the MAM development, forty-six patients were recruited to utilize the mobile solution, of whom 22 had RA and 24 SpA. There were 4,019 total interactions in the RA group, and 3,160 in the SpA group. Fifteen patients generated a total of 26 alerts, of which 24 were flares and 2 were medication-related problems; most (69%) were managed remotely. Regarding patient satisfaction, 65% of the respondents were considered to have endorsed Adhera for Rheumatology, yielding a NPS of 57 and an overall rating was 4.3 out of 5 stars. We concluded that the use of the digital health solution is feasible in clinical practice to monitor ePROs for RA and SpA. Next steps involve the implementation of this telemonitoring method in a multicentric setting.

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Copyright: © 2022 Benavent et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Diego Benavent has received speaker fees from Jannsen, Roche, grant/research support from Novartis and Abbvie. Francisco J. Núñez-Benjumea was an employee of AdheraHealth Inc at the time this research was conducted. Luis Fernández-Luque is an employee of AdheraHealth Inc. Victoria Navarro-Compán has received speakers fees from AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Janssen, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, UCB Pharma; she has been consultant of: AbbVie, Eli Lilly, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, UCB Pharma; received grant/research support from AbbVie and Novartis. María Sanz: None declared. Marta Novella-Navarro reports grants from UCB, Lilly and Janssen. Enrique Calvo-Aranda has received speaker fees from Abbvie. Leticia Lojo: None declared. Alejandro Balsa has received speaker fees from Pfizer, Abbvie, Lilly, Galapagos, BMS, Sandoz, Nordic Pharma, Gebro, Roche, Sanofi, UCB; he has been consultant of Pfizer, Abbvie, Lilly, Galapagos, BMS, Nordic Pharma, Sanofi, UCB; received grant/research support from Pfizer, Abbvie, BMS, Nordic Pharma, Gebro, Roche, UCB. Chamaida Plasencia has received speaker fees from Pfizer, Abbvie, Lilly, Sandoz, Sanofi, Biogen, Roche, Novartis; received grant/research support from Pfizer and Abbvie.