Temporal associations between emergency department and telehealth volumes during the COVID-19 pandemic: A time-series analysis from 2 academic medical centers.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled healthcare systems to rapidly adapt to changing healthcare needs as well as identify ways to reduce COVID transmission. The relationship between pandemic-related trends in emergency department (ED) visits and telehealth urgent care visits have not been studied.

Methods

We performed an interrupted time series analysis to evaluate trends between ED visits and telehealth urgent medical care visits at two urban healthcare system in Colorado. We performed pairwise comparisons between baseline versus each COVID-19 surge and all three surges combined, for both ED and telehealth encounters at each site and used Wilcoxon rank sum test to compare median values.

Results

During the study period, 595,350 patient encounters occurred. We sa

SUBMITTER: Reno EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8817426 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature