Researchers learned valuable information about the advantages of telemedicine for patients looking for main and specialized care during the COVID-19 epidemic. However, maintaining the usage of the care modality depends on patient satisfaction. To patient satisfaction with video-based telehealth, researchers conducted the study. During the COVID-19 pandemic, which is defined in the study as the period of time between the beginning of July 2020, the end of June in the following year, researchers compared patient satisfaction with telehealth and in-person clinic visits using data from standardized patient experience surveys.
Only 307,185 of the 1.5 million patients who got surveys during the study’s runtime elected to participate by filling them out. Of these individuals, 44,888, or fourteen percent underwent a telehealth visit, while the remaining 262,297 patients received care in person eight five percent. Responses from patients receiving adult medical specialty treatment, approximately forty seven percent, outperformed those from patients receiving primary care across the entire group (23.8 percent). Patients seeking hematology and oncology services made up the majority of respondents among those obtaining medical specialty care (8.4 percent).
Most of those who used telehealth, or 41.6% of the population, were in the 65 to 79 age brackets. The majority of those using telehealth were also female (55.8%), White (92.3%), and English-speaking. Those who availed of in person care of a similar age, yielded similar figures, with (46.3%), being a woman (55.5%), being White (94.5%), and speaking English respectively. In-person and telehealth visits within the study timeframe did not have significantly different patient satisfaction levels, according to the researchers’ analysis of patient ratings. No differences in patient age groups, sex, color, ethnicity, or language were found in their satisfaction ratings. Men did, however, express a slightly higher degree of pleasure with in-person visits than women, according to the researchers’ small disparities in feedback between the sexes. Patients under the age of seventeen reported higher happiness with in-person visits, and patients over the age of 80 reported higher satisfaction with telehealth than their peers, according to the researchers. At the end of the study, researchers concluded that telehealth satisfaction was highly comparable to that of in-person care during the time period examined.
