Standards of Comparison and Discordance in Rheumatoid Arthritis Global Assessments Between Patients and Clinicians.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Patient-physician discordance in health status ratings may arise because patients use temporal comparisons (comparing their current status with their previous status), while clinicians use social comparisons (comparing this patient's status to that of other patients, or to the full range of disease severity possible) to guide their assessments. We compared discordance between patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and clinicians, using either the conventional patient global assessment (PGA) or a rating scale with 5 anchors describing different health states. We hypothesized that discordance would be smaller with the rating scale because clinicians likely used similar social comparisons when making global assessments.

Methods

We prospectively studied 206 patients w

SUBMITTER: Ward MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5376375 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature