Telemedicine Use across Medical Specialties and Diagnoses

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic rapidly expanded telemedicine scale and scope. As telemedicine becomes routine, understanding how specialty and diagnosis combine with demographics to impact telemedicine use will aid in addressing its current limitations.

Objectives: To analyze the relationship between medical specialty, diagnosis, and telemedicine use, and their interplay with patient demographics in determining telemedicine usage patterns.

Methods: We extracted encounter and patient data of all adults who scheduled outpatient visits from June 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021 from the electronic health record of an integrated academic health system encompassing a broad range of subspecialties. Extracted variables included medical specialty, primary visit diagnosis, visit modality (video, audio, or in-person), and patient age, sex, self-reported race/ethnicity and 2013 rural-urban continuum code. Six specialties (General Surgery, Family Medicine, Gastroenterology, Oncology, General Internal Medicine, and Psychiatry) ranging from the lowest to the highest quartile of telemedicine use (video and audio) were chosen for analysis. Relative proportions of video, audio, and in-person modalities were compared. We examined diagnoses associated with the most and least frequent telemedicine use within each specialty. Finally, we analyzed associations between patient characteristics and telemedicine modality (video vs. audio/in-person, and video/audio vs. in-person) using a mixed-effects logistic regression model.

Results: A total of 2,494,296 encounters occurred during the study period, representing 420,876 unique patients (mean age: 44 years, standard deviation: 24 years, 54% female). Medical diagnoses requiring physical examination or minor procedures were more likely to be conducted in-person. Rural patients were more likely than urban patients to use video telemedicine in General Surgery and Gastroenterology and less likely to use video for all other specialties. Within most specialties, male patients and patients of nonwhite race were overall less likely to use video modality and video/audio telemedicine. In Psychiatry, members of several demographic groups used video telemedicine more commonly than expected, while in other specialties, members of these groups tended to use less telemedicine overall.

Conclusion: Medical diagnoses requiring physical examination or minor procedures are more likely to be conducted in-person. Patient characteristics (age, sex, rural vs. urban, race/ethnicity) affect video and video/audio telemedicine use differently depending on medical specialty. These factors contribute to a unique clinical scenario which impacts perceived usefulness and accessibility of telemedicine to providers and patients, and are likely to impact rates of telemedicine adoption.

Fig. 1

Percentage of patients using visit modality, by specialty. Stacked bar chart shows relative percentages of patients who had visits of each modality. Patients who had at least one visit were counted in the “video” bar; at least one audio visit (and no video visits) in the “audio” bar, and the remainder of patients in the “in-person” bar.

Fig. 2

Ranking of medical specialties by proportion of visits conducted via telemedicine (video/audio). Medical specialties ranked by the proportion of visits within the study period that took place via audio or video telemedicine. The horizontal black lines divide the quartiles. Medical specialties roughly evenly distributed among the quartiles were chosen for further analysis.

Fig. 3

(A) Original UTAUT model. (B) Possible interactions between patient demographics, diagnosis, and medical specialty on patient and provider use behavior within UTAUT. UTAUT, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology.