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The management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) depends more on the patient history than most other chronic diseases. A patient questionnaire provides a uniform, quantitative, protocolized, "scientific" patient history, with documented prognostic significance for work disability and mortality in RA greater than radiographs and laboratory tests and capacity to distinguish active from control treatment in clinical trials and to monitor clinical care with equivalent or greater significance than joint counts or laboratory tests. Therefore, a "scientific" approach to care of a person with a rheumatic disease involves review of patient function, pain, global status, fatigue, RAPID3, review of systems, self-report joint count, and recent medical history on an MDHAQ before conversation with the patient. This practice may be viewed as analogous to a doctor reviewing blood pressure, hemoglobin A1c, viral load, or radiograph before meeting with a patient who has hypertension, diabetes, HIV, or a healing fracture to provide a roadmap or agenda for the visit. Some sites have implemented RAPID3 without the remainder of MDHAQ, a practice that is discouraged. The MDHAQ requires only 5 to 10 minutes of the patient's time and involves a single sheet of paper, which is needed for a simple RAPID3, or even a patient global estimate of status to score a DAS28 or CDAI. Completion of MDHAQ/RAPID3 by each patient at each visit in the infrastructure of care with review by the doctor helps prepare the patient for the visit, improves doctor-patient communication, saves time for the doctor, and provides a roadmap or agenda for the visit.

The current approach to treatment of RA includes early and aggressive treatment with routine monitoring of outcomes to give patients the best chance of decreasing disease activity as much as possible, with low disease activity and remission being a realistic goal for many patients. In this quest, DMARDs, especially MTX, are the anchor treatment, and low dose prednisone should also be considered in combination with MTX as the best initial choice for RA treatment. Current data suggest that corticosteroids are disease modifying agents that enhance the effects of DMARDs with no real impact on adverse events. We are much better positioned now then in earlier times to provide a good outcome for our patients, and every available tool needs to be considered and utilized for this purpose.

The patient history often provides the most important information in diagnosis and management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other rheumatic diseases. A multidimensional health assessment questionnaire (MDHAQ)-with templates to score RAPID3 (routine assessment the patient index data), an index of three patient self-report measures, physical function, pain, and patient global estimate-pro- vides a "scientific" patient history. MDHAQ/RAPID3 scores meet criteria for the scientific method seen for laboratory tests: standard format, quantitative data, protocol for col- lection, and recognition of prognostic implications of levels for management decisions. Extensive evidence supports a scientific rationale for MDHAQ/RAPID3 scores, which are as efficient as joint counts, laboratory tests, DAS28, and CDAI to distinguish active from control treatments in clinical trials and correlated significantly with DAS28 and CDAI scores in clinical trials and usual clinical care, including categories for high, moderate, low severity, and remission. Pragmatic advantages of MDHAQ/RAPID3 include that the patient does almost all the work and prepares for the encounter to focus on concerns to discuss with the doctor. MDHAQ/RAPID3 improves doctor-patient communication and saves time for the doctor with a 10 to 15 second overview of medical history data that otherwise would require 10 to 15 minutes of conversation. RAPID3 is scored in 5 seconds, compared to almost 2 minutes for a CDAI or DAS28, and can be used effectively for treat-to-target in RA. MDHAQ/ RAPID3 is informative in all rheumatic diseases, including systemic lupus erythematosus, osteoarthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, fibromyalgia, gout, and others. All rheumatologists may include MDHAQ/RAPID3 in all patients in the infrastructure of clinical care.

Background. An index is needed to assess the status of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), as none of the existing measures are applicable to all individual patients. The 28-joint Disease Activity Score (DAS28) is the most specific and widely used index. Routine Assessment of Patient Index Data (RAPID3) is an index containing only the 3 patient self-report core dataset measures, without a laboratory test or formal joint count, and with simple scoring. RAPID3 is correlated significantly with DAS28, but calculated in 5-10 seconds on a Multidimensional Health Assessment Questionnaire (MDHAQ), compared to 114 seconds for DAS28. METHODS: DAS28 (0-10 scale) categories for high, moderate, and low activity, and remission (</= 2.6, 2.6-3.2, 3.21-5.1, and > 5.1, respectively) and proposed RAPID3 (0-30 scale) categories for severity (0 </= 3, 3.1-6, 6.1-12, and > 12) were compared in patients taking abatacept and control-treated patients at the endpoint of the Abatacept in Inadequate Response to Methotrexate (AIM) and the Abatacept Trial in Treatment of Anti-TNF INadequate Responders (ATTAIN) clinical trials, using cross-tabulations and kappa statistics. RESULTS: Overall, 92%-99% of patients classified as having high DAS28 activity had high or moderate RAPID3 severity, while 64%-83% in DAS28 remission had RAPID3 low severity or remission; 50%-82% of patients with good or poor EULAR responses had good or poor RAPID3 responses. Kappa values ranged from 0.25 to 0.48, and weighted kappas from 0.32 to 0.52, indicating fair to moderate agreement for the 2 indices. CONCLUSION: Proposed RAPID3 severity and response categories yield comparable results to DAS28 and EULAR criteria in AIM and ATTAIN. DAS28 is more specific for clinical trials. RAPID3 does not preclude also scoring DAS28, and may be informative in the infrastructure of routine care