An expanded Patient Perspectives program at ACR Convergence 2021 will feature digital posters along with a special oral presentation session during the annual meeting.
The session, Patient Perspectives, will take place from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. ET Sunday, Nov. 7. The four abstract presenters will have 10 minutes each to talk about their work, followed by a 5-minute question-and-answer period with each author. Registered attendees can watch a replay of the session on demand through March 11, 2022.
Session moderator Puja Khanna, MD, MPH, FACR, Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, University of Michigan, said that the goal of the program is to create a formal platform for patients to share their personal experiences with the rheumatology care community. Patients, no matter the type of rheumatic disease they live with, can discuss unique ways of handling health challenges and innovative partnerships they have created with their healthcare providers. This will lead to meaningful contributions towards their care and venues of advocacy for their peers with rheumatic diseases.
“Every intervention and trial that the medical community conducts is directed towards improvement of the patient’s condition, the patient being the most important stakeholder,” Dr. Khanna said. “However, not all patients experience the same disease uniformly. ACR attendees will have the opportunity of experiencing the patient’s viewpoint from the abstracts presented in this program.”
New for ACR Convergence 2021 is a digital poster session dedicated to a “Patient Perspectives” category with 9 posters. While the posters will be available throughout the meeting and beyond, the dedicated poster session will take place from 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. ET Sunday in Poster Session B. During this time, attendees can use the virtual meeting platform’s chat feature to interact with the poster presenters.
The 13 abstracts selected for either oral presentation or digital posters were selected after a blind review by a selection team of rheumatology professionals along with at least one rheumatology patient, who had veto power in the review process. Submissions had to address the question, “What adaptations did you and/or your healthcare team adopt to better care for your health?”, describe how the author has become more engaged in healthcare, and demonstrate an idea that was put into practice and how that idea was able to improve quality of life. The primary author had to be someone living with a rheumatic disease.
“I’ve heard a lot of my patients say that, ‘You’re coming from the viewpoint of bringing knowledge to the table, but I’m the one suffering from this, too. You need to hear me,’” Dr. Khanna said. “And that is the key.”
Abstracts from the oral presentations and the posters also were published in Arthritis & Rheumatology, the official journal of the ACR.
REGISTER TODAY FOR ACR CONVERGENCE
If you haven’t registered for ACR Convergence 2021, register today to access all of the valuable content during the meeting, November 3–10. Registration also includes on-demand access to the virtual platform (session recordings, Poster Hall, Community Hubs, and ShowRheum) until March 11, 2022.