Quality of care for patients with SLE: data from the American College of Rheumatology's RISE registry.

OBJECTIVE: Although multiple national quality measures focus on the management and safety of rheumatoid arthritis, few measures address the care of patients with SLE. We applied a group of quality measures relevant to the care of SLE patients and used the ACR's RISE registry to assess nationwide variations in care.

METHODS: Data derived from RISE and included patients with ≥2 visits with SLE codes ≥30 days apart in 2017-2018. We calculated performance on 5 quality measures: renal disease screening; blood pressure assessment and management; hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) prescribing; safe dosing for HCQ; and prolonged glucocorticoid use at doses > 7.5 mg/day. We reported performance on these measures at the practice level. We used logistic regression to assess independent predictors of performance after adjusting for sociodemographic and utilization factors.

RESULTS: We included 27,567 unique patients from 186 practices; 91.7% were female, 48% white, with mean age 53.5±15.2 years. Few patients had adequate screening for the development of renal manifestations (39.5%). Although blood pressure assessment was common (94.4%), a meaningful fraction had untreated hypertension (17.7%). Many received HCQ (71.5%), but only 62% at doses ≤ 5.0 mg/kg/day. Some received at least moderate-dose steroids for ≥ 90 days (18.5%). We observed significant practice variation on every measure.

CONCLUSION: We found potential gaps in care for patients with SLE across the U.S. Although some performance variation may be explained by differences in disease severity, dramatic differences suggest that developing quality measures to address important health care processes in SLE may improve care.