Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Mar 17, 2022
Date Accepted: Jun 27, 2022
The Association of Medical Preoperative Evaluation using Clinical Video Telehealth with Hospital Length of Stay: Descriptive Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Preoperative medical evaluation serves to identify risk factors and optimize patients before surgery. The importance of providing a telehealth option in the perioperative setting has played a significant role in reducing barriers to quality perioperative health care.
Objective:
We aimed to evaluate how telemedicine preoperative evaluations using clinical video telehealth (CVT) impacts hospital length of stay.
Methods:
We performed a retrospective chart review between 2016 and 2017 of adult patients who underwent evaluations in our hospitalist-run preoperative medicine clinic. Patients seen in our preoperative CVT program were compared to patients from in-person visits to evaluate the association of visit type (preoperative CVT versus in-person) with hospital length of stay, defined as hospital stay from postoperative day 0 to discharge. There were 62 patients included in this retrospective study.
Results:
The adjusted incidence rate ratio for hospital LOS was significantly shorter in patients who underwent preoperative CVT compared to in-person visit (IRR = 0.52, 95% CI 0.29-0.92, P=0.018).
Conclusions:
After adjusting for age and comorbidities, we show that preoperative telemedicine in the perioperative setting is associated with a shorter hospital length of stay compared to in-person visits. This suggests that telemedicine can play a viable role in this clinical setting.
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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.