Q&A: UPLIFT challenge awards $25,000 grant to BIRD for psoriatic disease outreach
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The Bath Institute of Rheumatic Diseases was recently awarded a $25,000 grant from Amgen and the International Federation of Psoriasis Associations.
The grant was part of the Understanding Psoriatic Disease Leveraging Insights for Treatment (UPLIFT) innovation challenge, in which psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis-focused organizations submitted proposals to achieve optimal outcomes in psoriatic disease treatment.
Healio spoke to Kave Niksefat, vice president and general manager of inflammation at Amgen, and Celia Mead, director of the Bath Institute of Rheumatic Diseases (BIRD), about the challenge, BIRD’s plan for the grant and why it is important to highlight these initiatives in the psoriatic disease community.
Healio: What is the UPLIFT challenge and what are its main objectives? Why is it important for those in the psoriatic disease community?
Niksefat: The UPLIFT Innovation Challenge is an Amgen-sponsored global challenge which was open to patient organizations from around the world — regional, national or local — focused on psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The goal was to identify solutions to the following challenge question: How can we unite people living with psoriatic disease and their healthcare providers to achieve optimal health outcomes? The question was purposefully broad to encourage innovative solutions to identifying and supporting patient and healthcare provider needs.
The challenge was based on results of the UPLIFT survey, which uncovered key areas of unmet need that require renewed attention, including: 1) the disconnect between patients’ perceptions of disease severity and how their disease is categorized by common measures of disease severity, and 2) the significant proportion of patients, regardless of disease severity, that were not receiving optimal treatment, despite the availability of new therapies.
Tremendous advances have been made, but healthcare providers and patients are still facing challenges — and who better to develop solutions to these challenges than the patient organizations striving every day to help improve the lives of people living with psoriatic disease?
Mead: At BIRD, we think the UPLIFT Innovation Challenge has been particularly important for encouraging our organization to think as broadly as possible about how we connect the largest number of patients we can in the psoriatic disease community to the services they need. In this newly virtual world, there is a discernible appetite for digital products, and our clinicians and healthcare professionals have freshly developed confidence. All we need are the resources and green light to try out different methods.
Healio: What made BIRD stand out to be awarded this grant?
Niksefat: BIRD’s solution proposes to connect people living with psoriatic arthritis and their families with healthcare providers on digital platforms, including a new webinar series and social media advertising campaign. The virtual activities will provide patients an opportunity to have meaningful interactions with healthcare providers to help deepen their understanding of their disease, improve overall well-being and overcome existing communication barriers.
Healio: What is BIRD? What was included in its proposed solution?
Mead: BIRD is a small medical research charity, established in 1975. Its patient engagement program was built upon its longstanding experience of running patient information days. BIRD aims to deepen patients’ understanding of their rheumatic conditions and to encourage their involvement in academic research. During the pandemic, BIRD switched to virtual delivery in place of live events and will be further developing its podcast program. The aim is for the knowledge of podcasts to reduce isolation and create community through shared comments and ultimately for listening to help deepen understanding, fill in gaps of knowledge between appointments, change expectations around treatments and outcomes and build confidence to ask questions of their HCPs. In addition to the podcast, the psoriatic arthritis (PsA) webinar is an opportunity to co-create a meaningful interactive session with a consultant and other experts and patients, which deepens understanding, improves well-being and overcomes disconnects.
Healio: What is this money earmarked for?
Mead: The money is earmarked for the patient engagement director’s time and costs in evolving and evaluating the program, and for facilitating the PsA webinar. This includes formative work interacting with patients and facilitating other digital patient offerings such as further podcasts.
Healio: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Mead: We’re so excited to be the winner of the UPLIFT Innovation Challenge. We’re already thinking about new ways to reach PsA patients digitally and keep developing our communities — it feels like permission to experiment!