Current Research
Optimizing Telehealth and E-Consult in Cardiovascular Care
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth use in cardiovascular care was limited. Challenges included payment model changes, privacy concerns, patient-clinician relationship impact, technology limitations, and potential disparities.Telehealth’s adaptations during the pandemic have the potential to enhance cardiovascular care and equity, but ongoing optimization is vital. Clinician-to-clinician or clinician-to-facility platforms, include asynchronous (“store and forward”) data transmission,…
Read MoreIncorporating E-Consult into Telehealth Strategy
The expansion of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t a temporary response. It was a result of changing patient behavior, expectations, and advancements in technology.The decreased availability of neurologists, especially in rural areas, and long waiting hours highlight the shortfall of neurologists that will increase to 19% by 2025. The medical community needs to adapt…
Read MoreE-Consult Effectiveness in Women’s Health
In a study of e-consult and gynecology, 7042 referrals were made in a 10 month study period. After exclusion of referrals to colposcopy and the early pregnancy clinic, 4738 e-referrals remained. Of these, 1013 referrals (21.4%) were triaged for an e-consult. One hundred and forty-seven patients (14.5%) with an initial e-consult were re-referred within 6 months for the same condition.…
Read MoreThe Practice of Psychiatric E-Consultation: Current State and Future Directions
This article affiliated with Harvard Medical School presents a narrative review of the existing literature on psychiatric e-consultation. The review aims to provide guidance on psychiatric e-consult practice and suggest future research directions. The review highlights the benefits of psychiatric e-consults, including improved access to specialist guidance in mental health care and primary care provider…
Read MoreTelehealth Cuts Health Care’s Carbon Footprint and Patient’s Costs
UC Davis and four other University of California health care systems and doctors used telehealth to serve their patients and tracked this data over the first two years of the pandemic. The video visits that took place saved substantial time, carbon emissions, and transportation costs. These savings included eliminating the need to commute 53,664,391 miles –…
Read MoreImproving Primary Care Access to Respirologists Using E-Consults
The Champlain Building Access to Specialists through E-Consultation (BASETM), a secure online platform that allows primary care providers to ask a clinical questions to different specialty groups with the expectation the specialists will respond within 7 days, conducted respirology e-consultations from January 2017 through December 2018. Each e-consultation was categorized by types of questions asked by the provider…
Read MoreThe Role of Telehealth in the Medical Response to Natural Disasters
In January 2023, California faced record-breaking precipitation which put additional strain on an already overburdened health care system. The advantages of using telehealth during natural disasters are presented by Brendan Carr, MD, Associate Dean of Healthcare Delivery Innovation at Jefferson (Philadelphia University and Thomas Jefferson University), and Nicole Lurie, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, authors of a 2018 JAMA…
Read MoreE-Consult in addiction medicine: An initiative in COVID lockdown
This article highlights the use of a mobile e-consult platform initiated by the Centre of Addiction Medicine in India, in light of the need for substance use services during the COVID-19 lockdown. The mobile e-consult platform was found to be a promising method to serve patients with substance use disorders, as it enabled providers to easily transmit cases and queries to specialists. Specialists received…
Read MoreClinical Effectiveness of an Outpatient Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management Telementoring Service
The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a Pain E-Consult Program (PEP), a multidisciplinary telementoring service based on the Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) model to reduce opioid use in the outpatient setting. A PEP was associated with greater reductions in morphine milligram equivalent (MME)/day compared with usual care despite similar rates…
Read MoreClinical Trends Over the First Year of a Psychiatric Electronic Consult Service
This study aims to determine which psychiatric diagnoses are most commonly used for e-consults inquiries, what types of questions are being asked by primary care providers to psychiatrists via e-consults, and what questions and which diagnoses result in a recommendation for in-person evaluations by psychiatrists. The study found that certain diagnoses and question types appear to influence…
Read MorePediatric Dermatology E-Consults Found to be Effective and Well-Received
A recently published paper in the Journal of Pediatric Dermatology assessed electronic health records of pediatric patients referred through e-Consults at the Massachusetts General Hospital from 1/13/2020 to 7/17/2020 and reviewed confidential surveys taken by pediatricians and parents to assess receptiveness. The results of the study support the use of e-consult for pediatric dermatology and indicate that…
Read MoreE-Consult for Rural Neurology
A new study explores he demand for neurology services at Geisinger, which exceeds the current clinical capacity. The utility of Ask-a-Doc (AAD), an electronic medical record-based interface developed at Geisinger to facilitate communication between primary care physicians (PCPs) and specialists, was implemented and assessed. It was found that AAD provides an interface between PCPs and…
Read MoreE-Consult Shown to Improve Access to Respirologists
A manuscript published in the International Journal of Quality Health Care titled, “Improving Primary Care Access to Respirologists Using eConsult” describes the findings from a retrospective review of 26,679 respirology eConsults. The publication details the most common topics and the most common types of questions asked by PCPs. The analysis found that in 23% of…
Read MoreStudy Finds E-Consult an Effective tool for Pain Management
The recent retrospective cohort study, “Clinical Effectiveness of an Outpatient Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management Telementoring Service,” published in the Clinical Journal of Pain, demonstrates the effectiveness of e-consult in reducing opioid use. The pain e-consult program (PEP) used in the study is a multidisciplinary telementoring service based on the ECHO model. The findings indicate that…
Read MoreE-Consult Associated with Increased Access to Safety Net Specialty Care
A recent study published in JAMA Health Forum analyzes 50,260 referral requests submitted during the year before and the year after e-consult implementation at 19 H+H specialty clinics in New York City. Researchers found that following e-consult implementation, 13% of referral requests were resolved electronically. Additionally, the percent of successfully scheduled in-person appointments increased 15.8%…
Read More