Telehealth: Simply a pandemic response or here to stay?

Extract

A systematic review in this issue of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) focused on teledentistry reminds us that telemedicine and telehealth approaches have been around for decades.¹ However, there is no doubt that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has dramatically changed not only the frequency of patient-clinician visits conducted via technology across a distance, but also the emergence of widespread electronic personal protective equipment (ePPE) when the patient and clinician are in the same setting, as highlighted by Turer et al² and Wosik et al³ in last month’s JAMIA. Moreover, the variety of technologies for achieving such interactions has dramatically changed as illustrated by 4 articles in this issue.^4–7 However, in another highlighted article in this issue, Ramsetty and Adams⁸ delineate the digital divide issues that make access to telehealth technologies difficult for vulnerable populations, including the homeless, during the pandemic.

In response to SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) and its associated disease, COVID-19, hospitals in Wuhan, China, deployed online fever clinics using a variety of platforms. Li et al⁴ describe the experience of Wuhan Tongji Hospital, which was the first public tertiary hospital to provide online fever clinic services. Individuals made appointments through the hospital’s app or its WeChat public platform. The sample for their analysis included records of 64 487 online and 16 537 in-person fever clinic assessments during an 18-day period. The average wait time for an online appointment was 7.2 hours, with an average consultation time of 1.2 hours. Online patients were younger and more likely to report multiple symptoms than were those with in-person assessments. In a random sample of 594 charts, the majority of visits focused on confirmation of diagnosis (60.6%) or seeking treatment (38.1%), with fewer than 5% focused on prevention or anxiety reduction.