Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis Symptoms and Complications with Telemedicine: A Systematic Review of Applications and Opportunities

Background: Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) stands out as a chronic inflammatory disorder that reduces the patient's quality of life to an extent worthy of effective management. Generally, patients may not access health services for consultations and treatment. Within such boundaries, a solution to the problem has been noticed from telemedicine improvements that will facilitate easy consultations or treatment access for patients. This article presents a systematic review of the applications and opportunities in telemedicine concerning the management of symptoms and complications of rheumatoid arthritis. Materials and Methods: In this systematic review, comprehensive searches were conducted using keywords referring to rheumatoid arthritis, telemedicine, symptom management, and complication management across international and national databases such as PubMed/Medline, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, SID, Irandoc, and search engines like Elmnet and Google Scholar. The initial search yielded ۲۴ articles. The inclusion criteria were limited to the last ۱۰ years of published full texts from open access sources and eliminated gray literature. After removing duplicates and critically appraising the rest of the studies using suitable tools, only eight studies were retained for further analysis. There was also consideration of ethics, so that there was bias-free in the selection, extraction, analysis, and classification of evidence. The abstract is reported as in PRISMA. Results: It comes out through the studies that above all telemedicine and digital programs are significantly effective significantly in managing rheumatoid arthritis. These technologies altogether increase the rates of disease control, reduced the number of clinic visits, and enhanced quality of life for patients. Video consultations will also facilitate the detection of the need for treatment adjustments, while the mobile applications for symptom tracking will prove to be important in showing the capacity of telemedicine. Conclusion: Encouragement of patients in the uptake of these tools remains a factor to consider. However, Discussion and Conclusion Telemedicine, therefore, enhances the quality of life of rheumatoid arthritis patients by providing easy access to medical care and providing continuous monitoring of symptoms. However, drawbacks such as lack of proper physical examinations, robust internet infrastructure, lack of privacy of medical information, and lack of direct human interaction continue to persist. Hence, an innovative and integrated infrastructure in health service delivery is a prerequisite.

کلیدواژه ها:

Rheumatoid arthritis ، telemedicine ، complication management ، symptom management