Footnotes

• Handling editor Josef S Smolen

• Presented at An abstract from this work has been accepted for presentation at the American College of Rheumatology Convergence 2020 meeting (https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/declining-in-hospital-mortality-gap-in-lupus-compared-to-non-lupus-hospitalizations-a-national-study/).

• Contributors JAS: Study conception and design, development of study protocol, review of statistical analyses, writing the first draft of the manuscript, critical revisions and submission of the manuscript and approval of the final manuscript version. JC: Data programming and quality monitoring, performance of statistical analyses, critical revisions and approval of the final manuscript version.

• Funding This material is the result of work supported by research funds from the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the resources and use of facilities at the Birmingham VA Medical Centre, Birmingham, Alabama, USA.

• Disclaimer The funding body did not play any role in design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript and in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the US government.

• Competing interests JAS has received consultant fees from Crealta/Horizon, Medisys, Fidia, UBM, Trio Health, Medscape, WebMD, Adept Field Solutions, Clinical Care Options, Clearview Healthcare Partners, Putnam Associates, Focus Forward, Navigant Consulting, Spherix, Practice Point Communications, the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Rheumatology. JAS owns stock options in Vaxart Pharmaceuticals and Charlotte’s Web Holdings. JAS previously owned stock options in Amarin, Viking and Moderna Pharmaceuticals. JAS is on the speaker’s bureau of Simply Speaking. JAS is a member of the executive of OMERACT, an organisation that develops outcome measures in rheumatology and receives arms-length funding from 12 companies. JAS serves on the Food and Drug Administration Arthritis Advisory Committee. JAS is the chair of the Veterans Affairs Rheumatology Field Advisory Committee. JAS is the editor and the Director of the UAB Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group Satellite Center on Network Meta-analysis. JAS previously served as a member of the following committees: member, the ACR Annual Meeting Planning Committee and Quality of Care Committees, the Chair of the ACR Meet-the-Professor, Workshop and Study Group Subcommittee and the co-chair of the ACR Criteria and Response Criteria subcommittee.

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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