TARISMA (sub-project 5): Integration of smartphone-generated disease data into an existing disease register to obtain comprehensive medication and adherence data for axial spondyloarthritis and psoriatic arthritis.

Awareness of the importance of comorbidities on the outcome of rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases is increasing. In the RABBIT-SpA registry, 20% of patients with axial spondyloarthritis and 27% of patients with psoriatic arthritis have three or more comorbidities. The RABBIT register for rheumatoid arthritis has shown that comorbidities not only occur frequently, but also have a negative impact on the course of the disease. Inadequate treatment of comorbidities not only leads to higher disease activity of the rheumatic disease, but also increases the risk of various adverse events such as stroke or myocardial infarction.

In RABBIT and RABBIT-SpA, antirheumatic drug treatment (biologics, conventional synthetic DMARDs, steroids and NSAIDs, including start and end dates, dosages, reasons for discontinuation and adverse events) is comprehensively documented. Comedication, on the other hand, has not yet been adequately recorded.

Project and main objectives

• To collect data on all medication used by patients and link it to the clinical data collected. To achieve this, a medical smartphone application was used.
• Gain insight into the medication adherence of RABBIT-SpA participants and integrate it into the app using an established adherence questionnaire
• More frequent recording of patient reported outcome (PRO) parameters than currently possible in the registry.For this reason, selected PROs such as the patient’s global disease activity, pain and fatigue will be integrated into the app. Patients are asked to answer these questions on a weekly basis. In this way, it is possible to analyse whether certain outcome parameters show a large variation during a defined time interval. The data from the app is compared with the PRO data collected as part of RABBIT-SpA.