While telehealth use has largely leveled off since the COVID-19 pandemic, one group of patients at Kaiser Permanente and UCSF Health has increasingly taken advantage of the technology.
Dementia patients at the Oakland, Calif.- and San Francisco-based health systems have had a big rise in telehealth usage, as these individuals often are elderly and have complex medical issues and find it difficult to travel or would prefer to stay home, according to a July 24 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
"We found that a key benefit of telemedicine — reduced need to drive long distances to a clinic — is being realized for these patients," said lead author Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, director of UCSF's Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research, in a July 24 statement.
The researchers compared primary care encounters during the prepandemic period of 2019-2020 to the post-pandemic period of 2021-2022 for 18,037 Northern California Kaiser patients with dementia and 419 such patients at UCSF. Those who went only in person fell from 60% to 27% at Kaiser and from 99% to 35% at UCSF, while hybrid care jumped from 34% to 44% at Kaiser and 0.7% to 44.9% at UCSF and telehealth-only treatment rose from 5.5% to 29% at Kaiser and 0.3 to 20% at UCSF.
Kaiser Permanente leaned on phone visits, while UCSF was more likely to use video visits. Meanwhile, Kaiser offered "virtual rooming," where medical assistants called 15 minutes ahead of time to set up the call, and UCSF provided tech support before the appointment in the patient's preferred language.