How do patients with systemic sclerosis experience currently provided healthcare and how should we measure its quality?

OBJECTIVES: To gain insight into SSc patients' perspective on quality of care and to survey their preferred quality indicators. METHODS: An online questionnaire about healthcare setting, perceived quality of care (CQ index) and quality indicators, was sent to 2093 patients from 13 Dutch hospitals. RESULTS: Six hundred and fifty patients (mean age 59 years, 75% women, 32% limited cutaneous SSc, 20% diffuse cutaneous SSc) completed the questionnaire. Mean time to diagnosis was 4.3 years (s.d. 6.9) and was longer in women compared with men (4.8 (s.d. 7.3) vs 2.5 (s.d. 5.0) years). Treatment took place in a SSc expert centre for 58%, regional centre for 29% or in both for 39% of patients. Thirteen percent of patients was not aware of whether their hospital was specialized in SSc. The perceived quality of care was rated with a mean score of 3.2 (s.d. 0.5) (range 1.0-4.0). There were no relevant differences between expert and regional centres. The three prioritized process indicators were: good patient-physician interaction (80%), structural multidisciplinary collaboration (46%) and receiving treatment according to SSc guidelines (44%). Absence of disease progression (66%), organ involvement (33%) and digital ulcers (27%) were the three highest rated outcome indicators. CONCLUSION: The perceived quality of care evaluated in our study was fair to good. No differences between expert and regional centres were observed. Our prioritized process and outcome indicators can be added to indicators suggested by SSc experts in earlier studies and can be used to evaluate the quality of care in SSc

Prediction of organ involvement and survival in systemic sclerosis patients in the first 5years from diagnosis

Background: Organ involvement often occurs in early systemic sclerosis and has been related to premature death. Identifying patients at diagnosis at risk of developing early organ involvement would be useful to optimize screening and management strategies. Objective: To develop prediction models for the 5-year development of interstitial lung disease, pulmonary arterial hypertension and death. Methods: A European multicentre inception cohort was created. For modelling, predefined clinical variables with known predictive value at diagnosis were used. Univariate and multivariate regression analysis were done to select baseline predictors and build the prediction models. The models were tested using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve comparing observed and expected frequencies. Results: Of 735 patients, 23% developed interstitial lung disease, 8% developed pulmonary arterial hypertension 12% died. The interstitial lung disease model included diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (OR = 1.8), systemic sclerosis disease duration65years (OR = 3.2), forced vital capacity65years (OR = 4.1), male gender (OR = 1.9), no anti-centromere antibodies (OR = 0.5), proteinuria (OR = 1.9), forced vital capacity<70% (OR = 1.8) and pulmonary arterial hypertension at diagnosis (OR = 10.1). The area under the receiver operating characteristic was 0.66 (95% CI 0.64-0.67), 0.66 (95% CI 0.64-0.68) and 0.70 (95% CI 0.69-0.72), respectively. Conclusion: We have shown that it is possible to predict interstitial lung disease, pulmonary arterial hypertension and death using established variables already available at the moment of systemic sclerosis diagnosis. Discriminatory performance of the models was suboptimal. Further research including new variables is necessary to improve performance