Telehealth Widely Used by Patients With Pediatric Neurology Conditions

Following a review of almost 50,000 visits, researchers from the Epilepsy Neurogenetics Initiative (ENGIN) at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that telehealth remained highly used following the elimination of in-person visit restrictions due to COVID-19.

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, providers put restrictions on in-person healthcare visits to avoid putting themselves and their patients at high risk of exposure to the disease. This resulted in an increased uptake of telehealth across specialties.

To determine the efficacy of virtual care in pediatric neurology, researchers at ENGIN and CHOP conducted a study that included about 50,000 visits, of which 34,837 were in-person, and 14,820 were telehealth outpatient visits. These visits represented a total of 26,399 pediatric neurology patients.

The study period extended from October 2019 and April 2021. The researchers' main goals were to gain information on utilization trends and the extent to which telehealth benefited pediatric neurology patients, including in the period after in-person care restrictions were lifted.

“In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the use of telemedicine visits, but now that telemedicine visits have been established as part of the care we are able to deliver, we had the opportunity to compare them more thoroughly to in-person visits,” said Michael Kaufman, first author of the study and data scientist with ENGIN at CHOP, in a press release. “…we were able to identify trends in how telemedicine was being used by individuals of different demographic backgrounds, neurological conditions, and other variables.”

Researchers concluded that, overall, telehealth remained widely used following the removal of in-person care barriers. Some patients, like those with epilepsy and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), used telehealth more than in-person care.

But certain patients engaged in telehealth less frequently, including those with neuromuscular and movement disorders and those who were younger. Ethnic minorities were also less likely to use telehealth, similar to patients with high social vulnerability.

Increasingly, providers are using telehealth to expand access to specialist and mental healthcare.

In May, a collaboration between Boston Children’s Hospital and Summus Global was announced to increase access to specialists through telehealth. The work between the two organizations includes the Summus Global staff working alongside the innovation and physician teams at Boston Children’s to develop new methods for improving virtual care and access.

Further, clinicians who spoke with mHealthIntelligence earlier this summer shared details regarding the various ways telehealth can be used to eliminate mental healthcare gaps, including utilizing the care modality to bolster the behavioral health workforce. They also shared factors that must be considered when expanding telehealth, such as keeping telehealth services device-agnostic.