Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Apr 15, 2020
Date Accepted: Jun 21, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 22, 2020
Rapid Utilization of Telehealth in a Comprehensive Cancer Center as a Response to COVID-19
ABSTRACT
Background:
The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in March 2020 created unprecedented challenges in the provision of scheduled ambulatory cancer care. As a result, there has been a renewed focus on video consultations as a means to continue ambulatory care.
Objective:
To analyze the change in video visit volume at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Comprehensive Cancer Center in response to COVID-19 and compare demographics/appointment data from January 1, 2020 and in the 11 weeks after transition to video visits.
Methods:
Patient demographics and appointment data (dates, visit types, and departments) were abstracted from the Electronic Health Record reporting database. Video visits were performed using a HIPAA-compliant video conferencing platform with a pre-existing workflow.
Results:
In 17 departments and divisions at the UCSF Cancer Center, 2,284 video visits were performed in the 11 weeks before COVID-19 changes with an average (SD) of 208 (75) per week and 12,946 video visits were performed in the 11 week post-COVID-19 period with an average (SD) of 1,177 (120) per week. The proportion of video visits increased from 7-18% to 54-72%, between the pre- and post-COVID-19 periods without any disparity based on race/ethnicity, primary language, or payor.
Conclusions:
In a remarkably brief period of time, we rapidly scaled the utilization of telehealth in response to COVID-19 and maintained access to complex oncologic care at a time of social distancing.
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.