Patients Found Less Likely to Cancel Telepsychiatry Visits, Study Shows

Patients with depression who scheduled an appointment to see a psychiatrist between July 2020 and October 2022 were less likely to miss or cancel the appointment if it was virtual compared with in person, according to areport published today inPsychiatric Services.“Appointment completion was higher for telepsychiatry than for in-person care among all patient characteristics studied,” wrote Catherine K. Ettman, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and colleagues. The findings “suggest that telepsychiatry is associated with improved e fficiency and continuity of care.”The researchers examined electronic health records for 12,894 patients aged 10 or older with a diagnosis of depression who scheduled 586,266 psychiatric outpatient appointments at Johns Hopkins Medicine between November 2017 and October 2022. They compared the number of in-person and telepsychiatry appointments that patients completed, cancelled, or failed to show up to before the pandemic with these outcomes of in-person and telepsychiatry appointments scheduled from July 2020 to October 2022. (The researchers did not analyze the appointment trends between March 2020 and June 2020 due to the fall in overall appointment completion rates caused by the pandemic.)Prior to the pandemic, the number of patients who scheduled and completed in-person appointments vastly outnumbered those who scheduled and completed telepsychiatry appointments. Between July 2020 and October 2022, however, teleh...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: appointments depression disparities in-person visits outpatient care pandemic Psychiatric Services telepsychiatry Source Type: research