VIDEO: How racism can affect treatment of RA

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify cperla@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

So I think most of what happens with this is that it limits access to care. And it also what's more important is it limits access to appropriate care. I'm not sure that we know that patients get the best information should we say even the correct information? I'm not even sure that we know that they have any idea of what they should be looking for. So that's the first issue.

I think the second it issue is access to medications therapies. We have real trouble with that, and we as rheumatologists don't necessarily know how much these meds cost our patients. We're very worried about trying to get access to what we think is the right medication for the patient, and yet that may take a lot of work, prior authorizations and everything, and that may then impact the patient even more so in terms of their cost and their access.

And then it's very hard for us to follow through to find out, did they buy the medication? Did they get hold of it? Have they been in ministering it appropriately? And so we start to talk about adherence, which we talk about a lot in lupus, but I think we have to talk about it also in the context of both structural racism and personal bias. And that's really become important with COVID because there's been so much fear, and then on top of it, patients had to resort to and been offered virtual visits which is difficult for us because we can't see the patient, we can't examine their joints, we can't really know how they're go doing.

They can tell us how many joints hurt, but I don't think they can really show us how many joints are swollen. And I think it's very hard to really in a detailed fashion be able to follow up on their progress. So, this impacts that issue even more because again, we don't have a way to make sure patients know how they can go about getting an office visit or how they can go about getting their medication.

And even though there's these programs from the different sponsors to make sure they can get their medication and there's follow up, in an academic center most patients don't about those programs or they're on Medicare and they're not even eligible for them. So, this is a really big issue that we should address more directly than we have.