Researchers have created a model to suggest which rheumatology visits can be effectively carried out via telehealth and which should remain in-person visits. The model not only could help to alleviate the decision burden on providers but also help to navigate how to incorporate telehealth into daily rheumatology practice as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, experts say.
The beginning of the pandemic quickly drove rheumatology practices to adopt telehealth – which in the past has been studied only in selective groups of relatively stable patients. In Duke University’s department of rheumatology, nearly 90% of visits were conducted via telehealth for several weeks in April and May 2020, said David L. Leverenz, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
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Since then, the practice has continued providing telehealth for a wider variety of patients: patients with high disease activity, those with low disease activity, people living 3 hours away or just 5 minutes from the medical center.
“Although the pandemic has really improved, and certainly we feel very safe providing in-person care, we’ve realized that it’s actually really possible to provide telehealth care to a lot of patients,” he said.
Duke University
Dr. David L. Leverenz
The model was then piloted with four Duke University rheumatologists for visits that took place from March through July 2022. A month prior to visits, researchers provided the rheumatologists a list of in-patient visits that the model suggested could be changed to telehealth visits. The list also included false changes, in which randomly selected visits were presented as being recommended for telehealth, although the model had not actually recommended the changes.
Dr. Leverenz and colleagues measured how frequently providers agreed with changes recommended by the model and the false changes. If a provider accepted a model-suggested change, the patient was contacted to either accept or reject the proposed switch. If a provider agreed with a false change, no additional action was taken.
Of the 201 patient encounters, there were 101 model-recommended changes and 100 artificial changes. Nearly all (99%) model-recommended changes suggested moving from in-person visits to telehealth visits. There was one recommendation to change a scheduled telehealth encounter to an in-person encounter. Of the false recommendations, 90 were for scheduled in-person visits, and 10 were for scheduled telehealth appointments.
Providers agreed with 71% of the model-recommended changes and with 21% of the false changes. Dr. Leverenz and colleagues reported “moderate agreement” between providers and model recommendations, reflected by a Cohen kappa coefficient of 0.45.
“This lined up pretty well with what providers thought was appropriate for the patient when presented with the information, and it also showed that, on top of current practice, that the model really does have the ability to expand appropriate telehealth care, which is really what we’re looking to do,” Dr. Leverenz said.
The article describing these results was published in Arthritis Care and Research.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, clinician preference for and experience with telemedicine were the biggest predictors of whether changes suggested by the model were accepted.