The objective of the study was to examine the agreement between patient- and rheumatologist-reported antirheumatic medication (ARM) use in the Ontario Best Practices Research Initiative.
We included adult patients who enrolled on or after September 1st 2010 and compared ARM use where rheumatologist visits and interviews occurred within 60 days of each other. Kappa statistic was used to measure agreement. We calculated sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive value, considering patient-reported data as the gold standard. To examine factors associated with agreement, a hierarchical generalized linear model was used. A subset analysis was also completed to compare start and stop dates of ARM.
Overall agreement for ARM was good with higher sensitivity and lower specificity for conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs compared with biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs. Increased Health Assessment Questionnaire pain index and 28 disease activity score-erythrocyte sedimentation rate (DAS28-ESR) were significantly associated with lower agreement. Reporting stop dates was higher (19.4%) for patient-reported data compared with rheumatologist-reported data (13.1%).
ARM reports had strong agreement particularly for patients who have low disease activity and pain. ARM discontinuation was reported more frequently by patients, which may indicate that patients may be discontinuing use of their rheumatoid arthritis medications before consulting their rheumatologist.