Nearly 30% of scheduled telehealth visits at a urology clinic were no-shows
Almost 30% of patients did not attend a telehealth visit at a urology clinic within a safety-net hospital in San Francisco during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a cross-sectional analysis showed.
Previously, few papers have examined telehealth barriers that are specific to — and may have a greater impact on — vulnerable populations receiving care in safety-net health care systems, Samuel L. Washington III, MD, MAS, an assistant professor of urology at the University of California, San Francisco, told Healio Primary Care.
Washington and colleagues analyzed the characteristics of 322 patients who were scheduled for an appointment via a telehealth encounter from the middle of March 2020 through the middle of May 2020. The patients had a mean age of 60.4 years, 82.3% of them were men, 30.1% were Hispanic and 97.4% had government-sponsored health insurance.
“Encounters were ‘non-attended’ if patients were unable to be reached after being contacted twice at their primary phone number,” the researchers wrote in Urology.
According to Washington and colleagues, 29.2% of the telehealth clinic encounters were not attended. A multivariable analysis revealed that patients who were single, divorced or widowed (OR = 2.36; 95% CI, 1.26-4.43), had an active substance use disorder (OR = 5.33; 95% CI, 2.04-13.98) and were new to the clinic (OR = 1.81; 95% CI, 1.04-3.13) were less likely to attend the encounter.
Despite the study being limited to one specialty, Washington said he “would expect the effect of these social factors to persist independent of the disease or specialty, although it is an interesting area for more investigation.”
The overall results “were surprising in many ways,” he said. “We found that factors commonly associated with non-attendance (ie, not attending clinic visit) in other populations (race, employment status and insurance status) were not significantly associated in this population. In addition, the impact of social factors such as marital status and active substance abuse had a greater effect on the odds of non-attendance than we had previously appreciated.”
Washington encouraged the medical community to use the study findings as the impetus for taking a closer look at the barriers their patients may face in receiving health care.