Research Grants to Study Telehealth Use in Rheumatic Disease Treatment

The Rheumatology Research Foundation has awarded grants to two studies that will assess the effectiveness of telehealth in rheumatic disease treatment and what its future looks like in a post-pandemic world.

Altogether the RRF, founded by the American College of Rheumatology, is awarding $1.65 million for five different studies that will research the relationships between COVID-19 - both the virus and the resulting pandemic - and rheumatic diseases. Two of the studies will focus on how telehealth is used, how patients feel about it, and what role it will play in the field after the pandemic is over.

Maria Danila, MD, MSc, MSPH, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will receive one grant for her study, titled Effectiveness of Telerheumatology for Delivering High-Quality Rheumatology Care During the COVID-19 Crisis.

The study will focus on comparing telehealth use to in-person treatment for rheumatic diseases based on patient preference and satisfaction levels. She plans to organize a controlled clinical trial to discover how effective telehealth was for patients and whether they were satisfied with it.

“We hope that our findings will be useful in shaping rheumatology practice in the future and that patients, clinicians and policymakers will be able to use the results to inform their decisions about telerheumatology practice,” Danila said in a press release.

She also aims to examine telehealth’s potential for sticking around after the pandemic is over. Telehealth gained popularity during the pandemic largely because it was one of the only ways for patients to receive healthcare services without exposing themselves and others to the virus. But as states and the federal government end their public health emergencies, some of those freedoms will end, and providers will have to maneuver through a new regulatory landscape to continue to offer virtual care.

The second connected health grant is going to Swamy Venuturupalli, MD, FACR, a community rheumatologist at Attune Health in Beverly Hills, CA, for his study, Telehealth-delivered HealthcaRe to ImproVE Care (THRIVE) in Community-Practice Rheumatology. 

Venuturupalli has similar goals, aiming to study telehealth’s efficacy with treating rheumatic diseases and to determine if and how providers and patients will continue using telehealth post-pandemic.

Using the results of a systematic literature review, Venuturupalli and his team will create a guide outlining best practices for telehealth. 

The research grant will also fund a patient study that seeks to compare telehealth and in-person care by monitoring patients’ conditions and health outcomes. 

“We’re still structuring how to do this, but our goal is to come up with a practical and easy way for rheumatologists to get a very good, objective sense of how patients are doing and thus fulfill the treat-to-target paradigm requirements using telehealth,” he said in the press release.

Using telehealth to treat rheumatic diseases has become a common method among physicians during the last year. Rheumatology appeared on Doximity’s 2020 State of Telemedicine Report on the list of top 10 specialties that are using telehealth. 

Even before the pandemic hit, a 2019 study conducted in Alaska showed telehealth’s popularity with patients and providers in treating rheumatoid arthritis. 

The Rheumatology Research Foundation grants come about a year after the American College of Rheumatology released a position statement supporting the continued use of telehealth services following the pandemic. 

The organization clarified that telehealth should not replace essential in-person treatment but supported the idea of using telehealth to increase access to care and advocated for telehealth reimbursement parity for audio-only and audio-visual visits.

The Rheumatology Research Foundation grants are also supporting two studies that will focus on patients with rheumatic diseases who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and how it will affect their health and future treatment. Another study receiving funds will examine the similarities between the body’s immune response to COVID-19 and the immune response to rheumatic diseases like antiphospholipid syndrome.