Lay summary
Biologic therapies for rheumatoid arthritis are very effective but very costly. Recent data suggests that some people who have a good response to biologic therapies can stop these agents and maintain low levels of disease activity. However, some people will relapse and have their arthritis symptoms return upon stopping biologics. Therefore, patients have to decide whether they want to risk having an arthritis flare against being free of potentially toxic medicines. Research has shown that people with rheumatoid arthritis do make trade-offs between these two factors (effectiveness and toxicity) although focused decision aids can help personalise the information. As such, a treatment decision aid that factors in individual patient preferences would be useful to help patients make choices. We will develop such a decision aid using a sophisticated dynamic computer interactive decision application that will individualise the information to improve the quality of decisions made by patients.