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dissertation (2)


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2022 (2)

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Dissertation
Patient Adherence to e-Health Interventions to Remotely Monitor Disease in Chronic Arthritis.

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Abstract

Background: Chronic inflammatory arthritis, gout and osteoarthritis are chronic conditions that require lifelong follow-up and long-term treatment. Electronic health (eHealth) systems could provide methods to remotely monitor disease in these conditions, possibly improving patient self-management and lowering the burden of in-person consultations for both patient and healthcare professionals. To use these systems in practice, it is important to understand adherence rates of patients with chronic arthritis to these methods. Objective: To systematically review the literature on adherence to eHealth methods to remotely monitor symptoms or disease activity in chronic arthritis, gout and osteoarthritis. Methods: We systematically searched the following databases: Embase, PubMed, Cochrane Central, CINAHL, Web of Science, Clinicaltrials.gov, and the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP). Eligible articles reported adherence rates to an eHealth method to remotely monitor disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), spondyloarthritis (SpA), osteoarthritis (OA), or gout. Quality assessment of the remaining articles was done by using the Newcastle-Ottawa quality assessment scale (NOS) and the PEDro scale. Finally, included articles were grouped by eHealth method and patient population, and relevant information on adherence was extracted. Lastly, a linear regression was performed to define the adherence depending on the different study durations. Results: The literature search resulted in 7027 articles. After deduplication, 4219 articles were screened for eligibility, and 47 articles were included. We found the highest adherence rates in studies applying electronic diaries (81.8%), followed by text messages (79.9%), web-based platforms (74.6%), wearable activity trackers (73%), and smartphone applications (65.5%). Highest adherence was reported in studies concerning patients with OA (79.7%), followed by patients with gout (73.7%), RA (71.3%), ankylosing SpA (67%), and JIA (59%). In general, although higher adherence was reported in adult patient populations, demographic characteristics did not seem to affect patient adherence to eHealth monitoring. Based on frequency of data entering, a time interval of once-daily showed highest adherence data (72.6%), followed by entering data more than once a day (72.3%) and once a week (67.7%), or longer (59.2%). A linear regression was performed on adherence levels (%) per study duration (days), and showed a decrease of 0.03% adherence per extra study day (Y = - 0.0332X + 71.84) (figure 2). Only the OA, JIA and SpA studies eventually showed a significant declination in adherence with longer study duration based on the 95%-confidence intervals of the slopes of the linear regressions (table 3). Conclusion: Our literature review identified declining adherence levels with longer study duration, and highest adherence rates to eHealth strategies to remotely monitor disease in studies on patients with OA, making use of electronic diaries as eHealth method, and requesting once-a-day completion. OA studies had an overall shorter duration than RA studies, which could be an explanation as to why OA patients showed higher adherence. Lower adherence rates were reported in studies in juvenile populations, while older age did not affect reported adherence.

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Dissertation
Long-term cost-effectiveness of early Rheumatoid Arthritis management in the CareRA study

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The objective of this thesis is to investigate the long-term cost-effectiveness of rheumatoid arthritis treatment dependent on the initial choice of medication scheme in patients recently diagnosed with the disease. Rheumatoid arthritis is one of the most common chronic inflammatory autoimmune joint diseases. If it is not treated or undertreated, it can cause deformities/disability, increased morbidity and mortality. Hence, early and sustained control of the disease is paramount. There seems to be a “window of opportunity” in rheumatoid arthritis where if treated early and successfully, patients have a good prognosis moving further. However, if initial treatment is unsuccessful, even new and more intensive medication may not be enough to fully control the disease. Therefore, rheumatoid arthritis can incur in high individual, medical and societal costs as well as a potentially compromised quality of life. From a health economical point of view, it is important to investigate to what extent different initial treatment choices and consecutive treatment steps within a treat-to-target strategy can lead to differences in longer-term costs. Cost-effectiveness/cost-utility analyses allow the evaluation of outcomes and costs of competing strategies designed to improve health. Therefore, we conducted a cost-utility analysis of the CareRA trial to study the cost per quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) of the different treatment strategies and how they differ among each other per risk group. Healthcare costs considered were rheumatology visits, RA-related medication, hospital admissions, laboratory and radiographs occurring during the 5-year trial. All pricing is based on December 2021 rates. Total costs per resource were calculated by multiplying the number of resources by the cost unit price extracted from Belgian national websites and summing them up per patient. QALYs were mapped from the Health Assessment Questionnaire, which is a measure of physical function, and adjusted for disutilities caused by adverse events. An incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was calculated by dividing the cost difference by the QALY difference per pair of treatment schemes. Multiple imputation was used to handle missing data with classification and regression trees and non-parametric bootstrapping with 25000 iterations of random sampling with replacement to calculate confidence intervals with the bias corrected accelerated method. The combination of methotrexate with a glucocorticoid bridging scheme (COBRA-Slim) was less expensive with better quality of life than more intensive step-down combination strategies or a conventional step-up approach 5 years after initial treatment. Around one-fifth of all patients were in need of biological treatment (second step treatment after initial failure) during 5 years Therefore, an initial combination of methotrexate and a moderate-dose glucocorticoid bridging scheme could have long-term effects for patients recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in terms of cost-savings and improved quality of life.

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