Do Smartphones Capture Patient Reported Data Efficiently?

During the 2017 European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) Annual Congress, CreakyJoints^®, the online patient support group, in partnership with researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, reported results from a study evaluating the relationship between different PROMIS instruments and RAPID3, a measure of self-reported patient disease activity.

The researchers aimed to better understand how patient-reported outcomes (PROs) using the NIH-developed PROMIS instruments compared to condition-specific disease activity measures in rheumatoid arthritis patients.

The analysis included 1,590 unique participants from the ArthritisPower research registry. The study found that the PROMIS Pain Interference, Physical Function, Sleep Disturbance, Fatigue instruments and RAPID3 are reasonably correlated to each other. Age, gender, race and other demographic factors play little role in explaining variance in PROs.

The researchers concluded that at-home technologies, such as the ArthritisPower mobile application, may help patients increase both the efficiency and the frequency of using PROMIS measures.

Dr. Nowell, Director of Patient Centered Research at CreakyJoints said, "We encourage patients to complete their PRO measures regularly—ideally once per week. However, this study demonstrates that patients may not always need to complete the full suite of PRO measures on a weekly basis in order to adequately assess disease activity. Some measures may be captured less frequently for patients with well-managed RA without sacrificing our understanding of disease activity."

More reports from EULAR 2017