In recent years, the ways in which patients can take courses has significantly broadened, moving beyond the traditional small-class format to also include courses by mail and the Internet. The National Council on Aging (NCoA) is the technical advisor to the AoA’s grant program for chronic disease self-management training. The NCoA is now developing a Web site where patients and physicians can find all the classes offered in their communities, but Wendy Zenker, vice president of the NCoA’s benefits access group, said she could not provide a target date when the Web site will become operational.
The Arthritis Foundation’s Dr. White agreed that a low referral rate by physicians is a major problem. In general, physicians "don’t refer enough to community services in any form," she said. To help address this, the Arthritis Foundation has recently been working with the American College of Physicians to alert internal medicine physicians about the arthritis self-management program. Yet another issue is the time commitment (2.5 hours a week for 6 weeks) for patients who take a class. "The majority of people don’t complete it," Dr. White said. "The issue is: How do we get people to do it? We don’t have that magic bullet yet."
Dr. White, Dr. Iverson, Dr. Solomon, Dr. Hadler, and Dr. Brady said that they had no disclosures. Dr. Lorig, Dr. Holman, and Dr. Fries said that they receive royalties from the licensing of the Stanford self-management programs and from sales of the teaching texts.