Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Perioperative Medicine
Date Submitted: Oct 12, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 29, 2019
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 1, 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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Potential Benefits and Drawbacks of Virtual Clinics in General Surgery: Pilot Cross-Sectional Questionnaire Study
Background:
Escalating demand for specialist health care puts considerable demand on hospital services. Technology offers a means by which health care providers may increase the efficiency of health care delivery.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to conduct a pilot study of the feasibility, benefits, and drawbacks of a virtual clinic (VC) in the general surgical service of a busy tertiary center.
Methods:
Patient satisfaction with current care and attitudes to VC were surveyed prospectively in the general surgical outpatient department (OPD; n=223). A subset of patients who had undergone endoscopy and day surgery were recruited to follow-up in a VC and subsequently surveyed with regard to their satisfaction (20/243). Other outcomes measured included a comparison of consultation times in traditional and virtual outpatient settings and financial cost to both patients and the institution.
Results:
Almost half of the patients reported barriers to prospective use of VCs. However, within the cohort who had been followed-up in the VC, satisfaction was higher than the traditional OPD (100% as compared with 187/223, 83.9%). Significant savings in both time (
Conclusions:
For an appropriately selected group of patients, VCs offer a viable alternative to traditional OPD. This alternative can improve both patient satisfaction and efficiency of patient care.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
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.