Photo: Pat Sargent
Researchers at UMass Chan Medical School are developing a remote patient monitoring system to improve continuity of care for people with lupus. Through wearable technology and a smartphone app, the system will be designed to provide more data to doctors to inform patient care.
“People living with lupus need to be seen by a rheumatologist on a regular basis. I may see a patient today and recommend a follow-up appointment four months from now, but the patient may experience a lupus flare between visits,” said Roberto Caricchio, MD, the Myles J. McDonough Chair in Rheumatology, professor of medicine, chief of the Division of Rheumatology, and director of the Lupus Center at UMass Chan, who is co-leading the project. “The concept of remote patient monitoring for people living with lupus is to monitor patients between appointments and provide better insight into their health status over time.”
The PILLAR project (Patient-centered interventions for lupus monitoring using learning-based adaptive recognition) is co-led by Apurv Soni, MD, PhD’21, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Program in Digital Medicine.
“Part of what we want to do is empower the patients to be able to track their symptoms and physiological data easily through the remote patient monitoring program,” Dr. Soni said. “The program can then generate insights that are much more actionable and allows the lupus experts to be able to have a much more meaningful interaction when they do see the patient in in the clinic.”
The project includes a randomized clinical trial to test engagement strategies and aims to enroll 50 or more patients for a remote monitoring program that will be implemented in collaboration with the Digital Health Clinic at UMass Memorial Health, led by John Broach, MD, associate professor of medicine and division chief of Emergency Medical Services in the Department of Emergency Medicine.
A parallel project will enroll 100 patients for experimental studies to identify new biomarkers for remote monitoring.
“We’ll launch the remote patient monitoring program using established biomarkers. Separately, we will run a clinical study that acts as an experimental lab to test new sensors and data collection methods,” Soni said. “We’re going to try and determine if there are ways to detect lupus flares more accurately and predict them by studying physiological changes in the body that precede symptoms.”
PILLAR is the first demonstration project within a new UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science (UMCCTS) program called Universal Network for Integrating Trials and Valuations at Doorstep, or UNITED, led by Soni and Allan Walkey, MD, MSc, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Health System Science in the Department of Medicine.
Participants will be equipped with wearable devices and asked to enter information regularly on a smartphone app. The app is being developed in partnership with the CareEvolution company that is developing the platform being used in the overall UNITED program to support decentralized studies and clinical care.
PILLAR is a three-year project, with the first year focused on platform development; second on the launch of the remote patient monitoring program and clinical study; and third dedicated to refining the platform based on the lessons learned and handing the platform over to UMass Memorial Health and the Lupus Center’s rheumatologists for continued use as a standard of care of people living with lupus. In the fourth year of the program, the UNITED program will pivot to a new challenge based on an open call for clinicians and other interested faculty to propose a problem that has the potential to be addressed through remote monitoring.
Caricchio said, “Once we have the data that shows that we can anticipate a lupus flare or capture a lupus flare at home, then we can expand that with the same model to the rest of the country and include other chronic conditions.”
The UNITED program is funded for $3.5 million over seven years by the UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science through its Clinical and Translational Sciences Award from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.
