Telehealth Usage in Otolaryngology: A Comparative Study Pre‐ and Post‐COVID‐19

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to increased telehealth utilization in outpatient otolaryngology settings. While other studies on telehealth usage in otolaryngology settings have focused on demographic disparities during the pandemic, none have yet assessed how these demographic disparities have evolved f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:OTO open : the official open access journal of the American Academy of Otolaryngology--Head and Neck Surgery Foundation 2024-01, Vol.8 (1), p.e109-n/a
Main Authors: Lee, Max L., Wei, Eric X., Kandathil, Cherian, Most, Sam P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
access
Clinics
COVID-19
Demographics
Demography
Editing
Ethnicity
Females
Gender
health equity
Hispanic Americans
Literacy
Otolaryngology
Otology
Pandemics
Patients
telehealth
Telemedicine
Trends
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Summary:The COVID‐19 pandemic led to increased telehealth utilization in outpatient otolaryngology settings. While other studies on telehealth usage in otolaryngology settings have focused on demographic disparities during the pandemic, none have yet assessed how these demographic disparities have evolved from before versus after the pandemic. This study examines 4 recent consecutive years of demographic and clinical data from a large hospital system to investigate how the COVID‐19 pandemic has changed demographic patterns in telehealth utilization. We demonstrate substantial increases in the number of otolaryngology patients participating in telehealth since the beginning of the COVID‐19 pandemic but with no differences in patient distributions by race or ethnicity over time. We also found that telehealth patients, on average, were younger, more likely to be English‐speaking, and more likely to be female. While these disparities widened slightly after the start of the pandemic, they were also present prior to the pandemic.
ISSN:2473-974X
2473-974X
DOI:10.1002/oto2.109