Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Jan 28, 2021)
Date Submitted: Jan 25, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Patient experience and satisfaction with telemedicine during COVID-19: a multi-institution experience
ABSTRACT
Background:
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) heralded an unprecedented increase in telemedicine utilization.
Objective:
Assess patient satisfaction with telemedicine during COVID-19
Methods:
Telemedicine visit data were gathered from two separate institutions (Stanford Health Care (Stanford) and the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS)). Patient satisfaction data from HSS were captured from a Press-Ganey questionnaire between April 19, 2020 and December 12, 2020, while the Stanford data was taken from a novel survey instrument that was distributed to all patients between June 22, 2020 and November 1, 2020. There were 60,550 telemedicine visits across 93 services at Stanford, each linked with a post-visit survey. At HSS, there were 66,349 total telemedicine visits with 7,348 randomly linked with a post-visit survey. The percentage of respondents who reported the highest possible likelihood to recommend score (“LTR top box percentage”) and mean overall visit scores were recorded.
Results:
Over 19 weeks, the LTR top box percentage at Stanford increased from 69.6% to 74.0% (p=.0002), and HSS showed no significant change across 35 weeks (p=.7100). LTR trend stability at Stanford was observed across 11 medical, four surgical, and five oncological services (p >.05). In the multivariable model, the use of a cell phone (aOR: 1.18; 95% CI: 1.12–1.23) and tablet (aOR: 1.15; 95% CI: 1.07–1.23) were associated with higher overall scores, while visits with interrupted connections (aOR: 0.49; 95% CI: 0.42–0.57) or help required to connect (aOR: 0.49; 95% CI: 0.42–0.56) predicted lower patient satisfaction.
Conclusions:
We present the largest published description of patient satisfaction with telemedicine. We found high satisfaction with telemedicine encounters across multiple measures, and we identified a number of important telemedicine-specific factors that predict increased overall visit score. These include the use of cell phones or tablets, phone reminders, and connecting before the visit was scheduled to begin. Visits with poor connectivity, extended wait times, or difficulty being seen, examined, or understood by the provider were linked with reduced odds of high scores. Our results suggest that attention to connectivity and audio/visual definition will help optimize patient satisfaction with telemedicine encounters in the future. Clinical Trial: n/a
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.