When patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) have care-related questions and requests outside scheduled visits, they involve a mix of administrative and medical needs and often include time-sensitive concerns, a study published in Muscle & Nerve found. The findings suggest that remote care models for MG may need to support structured communication and clinician involvement, not just symptom monitoring.
Physicians and nurses at an MG center in Berlin, Germany, documented 576 care-related inquiries over an eight-week period. Organizational matters (such as scheduling a visit) accounted for 55.4% of inquiries, while 41.3% involved medical issues. Many inquiries were time-sensitive: 20% needed a same-day response.
These findings help define what remote care models for MG would need to accommodate in practice. Many requests involved appointments, prescriptions and treatment management, suggesting that digital systems focused only on symptom tracking may not address the full range of patients’ needs.
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The frequency of time-sensitive inquiries also suggests that remote care models would need to support rapid triage and coordinated communication while maintaining healthcare professional oversight.
Among medical questions, worsening MG symptoms was the most common concern, accounting for 30.7% of the inquiries in this category. More than half of these contacts required a response within the same working day.
Questions about newer MG treatments accounted for another 19.3% of medical requests and included concerns about whether the treatments were still working, possible side effects and treatment management.
Physicians responded to 74.3% of inquiries, while nurses handled 25.7%. The most common communication channels used by the care team to respond were email (42.2%) and telephone (29%), followed by the hospital information system (13.7%) and a telemedicine platform (6.9%).
Inquiries were typically handled by whichever team member first received them, rather than through a standardized workflow. The authors said digital platforms could help route and document requests without replacing clinical decision-making: “Such tools would not replace physician judgment but could support early triage, more efficient routing of requests, and more consistent documentation within specialized MG care,” they noted.
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