Abstract
Psoriasis is a common and severe skin disease. Up to 30% of psoriasis patients develop psoriatic arthritis (PsA), another severe disease that contributes significantly to the burden of psoriatic disease in patients. The treatment of patients with both psoriasis and PsA is particularly challenging, because different strategies are often followed, and considerable resources are needed for these chronic inflammatory diseases. Of note, psoriasis patients tend to be undertreated. Efforts to improve the management of psoriasis and PsA are urgently needed, to incorporate improvement of patient outcomes by promotion of best practice from both the medical and the pharmacoeconomic perspective. These are the goals of the Quality Movement in the USA and of quality management in general. The need for evidence-based guidance on safety, efficacy, overall outcome, and cost-effectiveness is being addressed by numerous initiatives striving to generate practice guidelines, control costs, and optimize cost-effectiveness of treatments. The 2007 Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis’s (GRAPPA) Initiative for Quality aims to secure and improve management of psoriasis and PsA, elaborating on these evidence-based guidelines by defining major domains of quality and creating a checklist that identifies physicians who can administer state-of-the-art medical services to patients who need their services.
Key Indexing Terms:Footnotes
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Supported by an unrestricted financial grant from Abbott, Centocor, Wyeth, Amgen, and UCB Pharma.
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W-H. Boehncke, MD, Department of Dermatology, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University; A. Adebajo, MD, Academic Rheumatology Group, Division of Genomic Medicine, University of Sheffield; A. Cauli, MD, PhD, Department of Medicine, University of Cagliari; P. Nash, MD, Rheumatology Research Unit, Coast Joint Care; C. Salvarani, MD, Rheumatology Unit, Hospital of Reggio Emilia; A.F. Kavanaugh, MD, University of California at San Diego.
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