Transcript: How Should Rheumatologists Decide Which COVID-19 Informational Resources to Give Their Patients?

Garret Duron: I think that’s a great question, and the same criteria would essentially apply in terms of looking at resources for patients. The question becomes slightly different, but it’s similar in terms of the relevancy, accessibility, credibility, timeliness, and trustworthiness.

For choosing a resource for patients, you want to know how relevant is this going to be for them? Is this information you’re going to share with them directly about their condition and their comorbidities?

The accessibility of the question is a little bit different than it would be for you because you’re looking for them. Is this information presented at a level that they can understand, and they don’t need a medical background to understand?

In terms of credibility, we want to make sure that they’re getting resources from reliable places, so academic medical centers or government health agencies like the NIH or CDC all have phenomenal resources. American College of Rheumatology and other professional groups, like EULAR, have helpful content on this as well.

As far as the timeliness goes, we would recommend that they’re using a site where the content is updated regularly and is not going out of date, especially with how quickly things are changing with the COVID‑19 pandemic.

In terms of trustworthiness, the same thing applies here too. We just want to make sure that they are getting unbiased information and that there is not any commercial content from pharmaceutical companies or politically influenced content as well for them.

In our paper, we do reference a number of resources that patients can use that may be specific to some of the autoimmune conditions they have, like the Scleroderma Foundation, or Vasculitis Foundation, or Lupus Foundation of America, just to name a few. All have great content and information for these respective patients.