Rheumatology
Your departments can reduce unnecessary appointments, and free-up 100’s of hours of clinical nurse specialist time by remote managing patients through Living With’s arthritis products.
Source: North Bristol Trust case study
Around 10 million people in the UK have arthritis.
Clinical management of arthritis is often based on infrequent and pre-scheduled appointments regardless of the patients’ condition activity, with patient data collection solely based around these interactions. This means that patients may be in remission or have already experienced a flare-up when their consultant sees them.
Benefits
Deliver the following benefits:
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Save patient management costs by reducing unnecessary appointments, enable asynchronous consultations, stratifying which patients to prioritise for treatment, maximising opportunities for medication tapering, and facilitating and improving tele-clinic efficiency by providing improved granularity of patient data.
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Deliver outcome data to patients on biologics and maximise data collection opportunities for research, audit and quality improvement projects.
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Engage patients in their self-management and thus, improve patient understanding and engagement with their condition and treatment, and reduce flares by improving patient control of their condition. What’s more, patients can provide useful information ahead of their tele-clinics and face-to-face consultations due to tracking symptoms and better understanding their condition.
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Maximise use of time in clinics by improving resource allocation of patient interactions within the multidisciplinary team and providing longitudinal patient data in an easy to appraise format – meaning clinic time can be problem focussed rather than having to recap disease activity since the last appointment.
The clinician portal
The clinician portal enables clinicians to monitor, rehabilitate and support patients and optimise their interventions:
- Get patients to complete questionnaires to assess their condition.
- Send messages with updates, results and reading materials to your patients.
- Track a patient’s condition between appointments through diary entries and recorded flares.
The patient app
The patient app provides patients with a range of features to understand, track and manage their own conditions better:
- complete questionnaires to assess your condition
- report flares to track your symptoms
- set goals for self-motivation and clear objectives
- send messages to your clinician
- track your medication and receive notifications to remind you to take it
- read articles in the library to improve your understanding of your condition
- keep a diary to monitor your condition
Results and Feedback
A service evaluation shows that Living With Rheumatoid Arthritis is delivering an efficient shift in working practice: a virtual review takes approximately 15 minutes to complete (including administration time) versus F2F reviews which take 30 minutes + 10 minutes administration time.
This leads to considerable time savings on clinical nurse specialist time, and over the last 14 months, at the North Bristol Trust, 142 hours of clinical nurse specialist time have been saved.
Source: Philip D H Hamann, Nicola Minaur, Jon H Tobias, Emma M Clark, Capturing remote disease activity – results of a 12-month clinical pilot of a smartphone app in NHS rheumatology clinics in Bristol, Rheumatology, Volume 59, Issue 8, August 2020, Pages 2158–2161, https://doi.org/10.1093/rheumatology/keaa015.
Clinician feedback
A PubMed article – Rheumatology (Oxford) – explores the efficacy of Living With Arthritis.
For information on the efficacy of Living With’s rheumatology products head to the Evidence page and the Rheumatology Case Studies page.
