US Physicians’ Perspective on the Sudden Shift to Telehealth: Survey Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Given the sudden shift to telemedicine during the early COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted a survey of practicing physicians' experience with telehealth during the prepandemic and early pandemic periods. Our survey estimates that most patient visits in the United States during the early COVID-19 pandemic period were conducted via telehealth. Given this magnitude and the potential benefits and challenges of telehealth for the US health care system, in this paper, we obtain, summarize, and analyze telehealth views and experiences of US-based practicing-physicians. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine the extent of shift toward telehealth training and care provision during the early pandemic from the US-based practicing physicians' perspective. We also sought to determine the short- and long-term implications of this shift on the quality, access, and mode of US health care delivery. METHODS: We conducted a purposive, snowball-sampled survey of US practicing-physicians. A total of 148 physician completed the survey. Data were collected from July 17, 2020, through September 4, 2020. RESULTS: Sample training intensity scaled 21-fold during the early pandemic period, and patient-care visits conducted via telehealth increased, on average, from 13.1% directly before the pandemic to 59.7% during the early pandemic period. Surveyed physician respondents reported that telehealth patient visits and face-to-face patient visits are comparable in quality. The difference was not statistically significant based on a nonparametric sign test (P=.11). Moreover, physicians feel that telehealth care should continue to play a larger role (44.9% of total visits) in postpandemic health care in the United States. Our survey findings suggest a high market concentration in telehealth software, which is a market structural characteristic that may have implications on the cost and access of telehealth. The results varied markedly by physician employer type. CONCLUSIONS: During the shift toward telehealth, there has been a considerable discovery among physicians regarding US telehealth physicians. Physicians are now better prepared to undertake telehealth care from a training perspective. They are favorable toward a permanently expanded telehealth role, with potential for enhanced health care access, and the realization of enhanced access may depend on market structural characteristics of telehealth software platforms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".