One of the biggest challenges brought about by the COVID-19 lockdowns, when that started back in March of 2020, was how clinics and hospitals would be able to continuously provide care for patients who could no longer step out of their homes. Gradually, the healthcare industry found a widespread solution: virtual visits.
What are Virtual Doctor Visits?
Essentially, virtual visits are doctor visits that happen either via video conferencing or over the phone. However, for a good number of healthcare professionals, these visits were a whole new idea altogether.
The journal JMIR Medical Informatics published a study last December 4, 2020, which examined the increase in virtual visits of the telehealth infrastructure that University of Chicago Medicine built just like many hospital systems across the country. The study also offered recommended policies in order to better encourage virtual visits.
Accessibility
One of the co-authors of the study is Dr. Craig Umscheid, MD, the University of Chicago Medicine Vice President of Healthcare Delivery Science. He is also the university’s Chief Quality and Innovation Officer. They found that virtual visits are just as good as visits that are done in person. Going forward, telephone visits are particularly important. This is so that it will be possible to continuously provide better healthcare service to communities who have little to no access to technology that they require for video visits.
Telehealth
A new era of widespread telehealth was ushered in when the University of Chicago Medical Center as well as the five practice sites it had started giving their patients options. A patient could either have their appointments rescheduled or switch to a virtual visit instead—either over the phone, or through video conferencing.
Technology has existed for quite some time in order for virtual visits to be made possible. However, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as commercial insurance providers generally did not honor or cover the visits in question. When the global coronavirus pandemic ballooned into a very public health emergency, CMS expanded their coverage to include virtual visits. That triggered a number of commercial insurance companies to follow suit.
For the effects of the visits to be understood fully, a research team from University of Chicago—including Sachin Shah, MD, a senior author and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer for the University of Chicago Medicine, went about analyzing the data in order to discover exactly who was making use of the virtual visit option within the stay-at-home order’s first 11 weeks.
The results were that a whopping 60 percent of visits to the University of Chicago Medicine were virtual. 40 percent of those were done over the phone, while the remaining 60 percent did so through video. Also, telephone visits were more likely to be used by older patients, Black patients, as well as those with Medicaid and Medicare.
Conclusion
Making the switch to virtual visits came about largely because of the coronavirus pandemic. It allows for better accessibility options even after the pandemic crisis ends. The technology has always been there, and it is possible to make the most of it now more than ever.
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