Why carry out this study?

Participation in clinical trials often requires time-consuming travel to academic centers or urban areas, which may lead to lower rates of participation and enrollment of less diverse subjects.

Teledermatology has the potential to bridge this gap; however, remote assessments should be reliable and robust across patients with different skin tones and clinical assessors of different experience levels.

This study sought to determine whether psoriasis severity could be reliably assessed remotely through digital images, and whether patient skin tone or the experience level of the assessor impacted this reliability.

What was learned from the study?

Overall, all digital image-based assessors showed good agreement with a face-to-face assessor when evaluating patients with psoriasis across a range of disease severity.

Remote and face-to-face assessments demonstrated good concordance regardless of patient skin tone or the training level of the assessors.

Our pilot study lays the groundwork for further expanding telehealth-based clinical trials for patients of varied different skin tones in underserved areas.