Arthritis Foundation Launches New PROs Grant Program With First Cohort of Awardees

By Vandana Suresh, PhD | March 18, 2026 

The Arthritis Foundation recognizes the utmost importance of including patient lived experience in guiding treatment decisions and evaluating the efficacy of care. In support of this mission, the Foundation announced its first cohort of awardees in the Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) Grant Program.  

"I want to thank the Arthritis Foundation for allowing us to move forward with work around PROs. As we explore biomarkers and translational medicine, we need to understand what the patients are experiencing, and the only way we can do that is through better PROs,” says Bing Bingham, MD, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine, and the chair of the Arthritis Foundation’s PRO advisory committee. “The [2025] RFP was focused on PROs in shared decision making and the proposals that we received were quite excellent, really across the board, but there were two that came out to be the most outstanding." 

The 2025 Arthritis Foundation PROs Grant Program awardees are Maja Kuharic, PhD, from Northwestern University, and Gabriela Schmajuk, MD, from the University of California, San Francisco. 

PROs are direct patient descriptions of their symptoms, using standardized methods that are similar to surveys. PROs can cover patient satisfaction with care and how the treatment affected their overall well-being, among other measures. Since the 2000s, PROs have gained significant attention as tools for use in both clinical care and clinical research, including use as outcome measures in clinical trials for rheumatoid arthritis.  

Within the Arthritis Foundation, the Live Yes! INSIGHTS program, launched in 2018, provided powerful information to support the Arthritis Foundation’s mission to help transform the lives of people with arthritis. This set of patient-reported outcome measures resulted in more than 18,000 people providing their insights into the daily struggles of living with arthritis. In addition, the Foundation has been supporting PROs research through individualized grants. 

However, in 2025, the Arthritis Foundation took a significant step in advancing PROs research through a formalized grant program. In April, the Foundation teamed up with Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine to co-sponsor a roundtable of national experts to discuss advancing care and outcomes for adults living with arthritis. The meeting helped lay the groundwork for the Foundation’s new PROs Grant Program. The first cycle of the Foundation’s PROs Grant Program has now been completed with grants totaling nearly $470,000. 

With her funding, PROs Grant Program awardee Dr. Kuharic and her team aim to improve patient-doctor communication by creating a personalized computer dashboard that highlights a patient's health information, such as pain interference, physical function, fatigue and depression, in terms of what matters most to them. In the future, this approach could potentially be used in arthritis clinics everywhere to ensure that treatment decisions truly reflect what matters most to each patient. 

PROs Grant Program winner Dr. Schmajuk and her team will build on their existing PROs dashboard for rheumatoid arthritis by adding a new AI feature, called AURA (AI tool for Understanding RA). AURA will use large language models to turn PRO data into plain-language summaries and give possible next steps for care based on trusted medical guidelines. By making PRO data easier to understand, AURA could help patients and doctors make decisions together, leading to faster, more personalized treatment. 

“The new PROs Grant Program marks an important step for the Arthritis Foundation,” says Paul Larkin, PhD, vice-president of Science at the Foundation. “By making a sustained investment in research that centers the patient voice, we are ensuring that patient-reported data meaningfully informs both care and clinical research. Over time, this program has the potential to significantly improve how we measure outcomes and make clinical care decisions.”