New Questions
We’re introducing some new questions with the January questionnaire. Having a chronic disease makes you very familiar with the medical system. Doctors’ offices, hospitals, pharmacies and insurance can help you get through the system, or sometimes they seem to slow you down when all you want to do is feel better. To learn about your experiences, we’re asking if you have problems using the system, and if so, how important the problems are to you. Other new questions ask about what you would need from a new medication. Switching medications can sometimes be a risk. There may be new side effects and the hassle of tests you’ll have to take before you can switch. You might get better results or you might not. By looking at your answers to these questions and the severity of your condition, we hope to understand what motivates people to try new medications.
Improved Questions
Last time we asked new questions about how much people pay out of pocket for medications and doctor visits. Many of you commented that the way we allowed you to answer didn’t really let you explain how your insurance works. To make answering a bit easier we now ask about your out of pocket expenses for generic and brand name medications separately. What we hope to learn is the average expense for your medications. Some of you pay different amounts for different drugs. In that case, please tell us the average expense to the best of your abilities, either as a dollar figure or as a percentage. Please contact us if you have questions when you get to that section.
Staying on top of the world wide web
There is a world of information about rheumatic diseases available to you on the web, and it changes every day. You could easily drive yourself nuts trying to wade through all of the articles in newspapers, medical journals and medical websites just to see what’s new in treatments or research. Fortunately, you don’t have to do all the work yourself. The NDB maintains a blog, or web log, of the latest NDB news and rheumatic disease news from the all over the world. It’s called NDB Connection, and it’s a great place to start when you’re looking for the latest news.We pick out a few of the most interesting news articles each week and refer back to the original article.
Read the blog online at ndb.blogspot.com. There’s also an RSS feed so you can be automatically notified whenever the blog is updated. Read about how to use that on the blog.