Publications

BACKGROUND: During the COVID-19 pandemic, many ambulatory clinics transitioned to telehealth, but it remains unknown how this may have exacerbated inequitable access to care.

OBJECTIVE: Given the potential barriers faced by different populations, we investigated whether telehealth use is consistent and equitable across age, race, and gender.

METHODS: Our retrospective cohort study of outpatient visits was conducted between March 2 and June 10, 2020, compared with the same time period in 2019, at a single academic health center in Boston, Massachusetts. Visits were divided into in-person visits and telehealth visits and then compared by racial designation, gender, and age.

RESULTS: At our academic medical center, using a retrospective cohort analysis of ambulatory care delivered between March 2 and June 10, 2020, we found that over half (57.6%) of all visits were telehealth visits, and both Black and White patients accessed telehealth more than Asian patients.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate that the rapid implementation of telehealth does not follow prior patterns of health care disparities.

IMPORTANCE: Alternative methods for hospital occupancy forecasting, essential information in hospital crisis planning, are necessary in a novel pandemic when traditional data sources such as disease testing are limited.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether mandatory daily employee symptom attestation data can be used as syndromic surveillance to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations in the communities where employees live.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This cohort study was conducted from April 2, 2020, to November 4, 2020, at a large academic hospital network of 10 hospitals accounting for a total of 2384 beds and 136 000 discharges in New England. The participants included 6841 employees who worked on-site at hospital 1 and lived in the 10 hospitals' service areas.

EXPOSURE: Daily employee self-reported symptoms were collected using an automated text messaging system from a single hospital.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Mean absolute error (MAE) and weighted mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 7-day forecasts of daily COVID-19 hospital census at each hospital.

RESULTS: Among 6841 employees living within the 10 hospitals' service areas, 5120 (74.8%) were female individuals and 3884 (56.8%) were White individuals; the mean (SD) age was 40.8 (13.6) years, and the mean (SD) time of service was 8.8 (10.4) years. The study model had a MAE of 6.9 patients with COVID-19 and a weighted MAPE of 1.5% for hospitalizations for the entire hospital network. The individual hospitals had an MAE that ranged from 0.9 to 4.5 patients (weighted MAPE ranged from 2.1% to 16.1%). For context, the mean network all-cause occupancy was 1286 during this period, so an error of 6.9 is only 0.5% of the network mean occupancy. Operationally, this level of error was negligible to the incident command center. At hospital 1, a doubling of the number of employees reporting symptoms (which corresponded to 4 additional employees reporting symptoms at the mean for hospital 1) was associated with a 5% increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations at hospital 1 in 7 days (regression coefficient, 0.05; 95% CI, 0.02-0.07; P < .001).

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: This cohort study found that a real-time employee health attestation tool used at a single hospital could be used to estimate subsequent hospitalizations in 7 days at hospitals throughout a larger hospital network in New England.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Transitional care management (TCM) visits delivered following hospitalization have been associated with reductions in mortality, readmissions, and total costs; however, uptake remains low. We sought to describe trends in TCM visit delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of ambulatory electronic health records from December 30, 2019 and January 3, 2021.

SETTING: United States.

PARTICIPANTS: Forty four thousand six hundred and eighty-one patients receiving transitional care management services.

MEASUREMENTS: Weekly rates of in-person and telehealth TCM visits before COVID-19 was declared a national emergency (December 30, 2019 to March 15, 2020), during the initial pandemic period (March 16, 2020 to April 12, 2020) and later period (April 12, 2020 to January 3, 2021). Characteristics of patients receiving in-person and telehealth TCM visits were compared.

RESULTS: A total of 44,681 TCM visits occurred during the study period with the majority of patients receiving TCM visits age 65 years and older (68.0%) and female (55.0%) Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all TCM visits were conducted in-person. In the initial pandemic, there was an immediate decline in overall TCM visits and a rise in telehealth TCM visits, accounting for 15.4% of TCM visits during this period. In the later pandemic, the average weekly number of TCM visits was 841 and 14.0% were telehealth. During the initial and later pandemic periods, 73.3% and 33.6% of COVID-19-related TCM visits were conducted by telehealth, respectively. Across periods, patterns of telehealth use for TCM visits were similar for younger and older adults.

CONCLUSION: The study findings highlight a novel and sustained shift to providing TCM services via telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may reduce barriers to accessing a high-value service for older adults during a vulnerable transition period. Further investigations comparing outcomes of in-person and telehealth TCM visits are needed to inform innovation in ambulatory post-discharge care.

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may have affected the preventability of 30-day hospital revisits, including readmissions and emergency department (ED) visits without admission. This study was conducted to examine the preventability of 30-day revisits for patients admitted with COVID-19 in order to inform the design of interventions that may decrease preventable revisits in the future.

METHODS: The study team retrospectively reviewed a cohort of adults admitted to an academic medical center with COVID-19 between March 21 and June 29, 2020, and discharged alive. Patients with a 30-day revisit following hospital discharge were identified. Two-physician review was used to determine revisit preventability, identify factors contributing to preventable revisits, assess potential preventive interventions, and establish the influence of pandemic-related conditions on the revisit.

RESULTS: Seventy-six of 576 COVID-19 hospitalizations resulted in a 30-day revisit (13.2%), including 21 ED visits without admission (3.6%) and 55 readmissions (9.5%). Of these 76 revisits, 20 (26.3%) were potentially preventable. The most frequently identified factors contributing to preventable revisits were related to the choice of postdischarge location and to patient/caregiver understanding of the discharge medication regimen, each occurring in 25.0% of cases. The most frequently cited potentially preventive intervention was "improved self-management plan at discharge," occurring in 65.0% of cases. Five of the 20 preventable revisits (25.0%) had contributing factors that were thought to be directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

CONCLUSION: Although only approximately one quarter of 30-day hospital revisits following admission with COVID-19 were potentially preventable, these results highlight opportunities for improvement to reduce revisits going forward.