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摘要

Rothschild rightly laments the insufficient undergraduate and primary care musculoskeletal training in the USA, a situation replicated in Australia. This means that an adept musculoskeletal examination will generally be unavailable at the patient end in telerheumatology consultations. To address this by attempting to train and upskill a community-based workforce would take many years, high levels of sustained commitment, and substantial resources. While acknowledging this skill shortage, we feel that telerheumatology is already a useful model as a complement to face-to-face consultations. That is, for the many patients where travel time is considerable, some, but not all, of the consultations are better done using telerheumatology. A list of clinical situations that might be suitable for telerheumatology consultation is provided in our original article. The potential scope of telerheumatology has also been expanded by advances in patient-reported outcome measures in rheumatoid arthritis, such as the validated Routine Assessment of Patient Index Data 3 which removes the need for expert examination in a percentage of consultations.