Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Feb 7, 2024
Date Accepted: Feb 14, 2025
Can Telemedicine Booths Improve Screening for Cardiovascular Risk Factors? A Prospective Multicenter Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension often remain undetected and untreated. This was particularly problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic when there were fewer in-person medical consultations.
Objective:
This study aimed to determine whether health screening using a telemedicine booth would have an impact on people’s medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
Health screening was run using a telemedicine booth (the consult station) that was placed in three different vaccination centers in northern France between July 2021 and September 2021. Participants followed a series of instructions to obtain various measures, including their blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), and heart rate. If any measures were found to be outside of the normal range, participants were advised to consult a doctor. Three months later, the participants with abnormal readings were contacted by telephone and were asked a series of standardized questions. The primary outcome was the percentage of respondents who reported that they had consulted a doctor since the health check.
Results:
Approximately 6000 people attended the three vaccination centers over the study period. Of these, 2500 (42%) used the consult station. A total of 1333 participants (53%) were found to have abnormal readings, which mostly concerned their blood pressure (diastolic: 41%; systolic: 28%), heart rate (37%), or BMI (30%). There were 638 participants who responded to the follow-up call, and 234 (37%) reported that they had consulted a doctor since the health check, although 158 (25%) reported that they would have done so even without the screening.
Conclusions:
We succeeded in screening large numbers of people for cardiovascular risk factors during the COVID-19 pandemic by using a telemedicine booth. Although relatively few participants with abnormal readings reported that they went on to consult a physician, the screening would nevertheless have raised people’s awareness of their cardiovascular risk factors.
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.