Rheum@Home: RA Remote Patient Monitoring (R@H)

The goal of this pragmatic multicentre clinical trial is to investigate whether telemonitoring with Rheum@Home leads to less outpatient visits, while maintaining tight disease control and high patient-experienced quality of care in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Participants will be asked to complete questionaires every 4 weeks perform a walking test every 4 weeks routine lab routine disease activity measurement by a qualified assessor Researchers will compare care via the telemedicine system (intervention) or standard care (control) to see if there are differences in the number of rheumatology outpatient visits and patient reported quality of care after 12 months follow up.

measured with visual analogue scale (VAS) scores (0-10; higher score indicates higher quality) in seven relevant domains: patients' satisfaction with health care, patients' experiences contacting their health-care providers, the extent to which health care meets patients' expectations, healthcare workers' timeliness of response to questions and symptoms, health-care workers' fulfilment of agreements, health-care workers attentiveness to acute situations, and hospital accessibility in case of symptoms. A mean score of 8 out of 10 or higher was predefined as perceived high quality

Inclusion Criteria: all consecutive patients; signed, written informed consent; 18 -75 years of age; clinical diagnosis of RA; ≥ 6 months stable low disease activity or remission, according to the treating rheumatologist; able to read and understand simple Dutch language instructions; ownership or access to a smartphone, tablet or computer and having internet access; able to conduct a teleconsultation on a smartphone, tablet or computer. Exclusion Criteria: severe comorbidity or other factors necessitating continuation of regular outpatient visits, according to the treating rheumatologist