Telemedicine and Patient Experience Ratings at an Academic Integrative Medicine Practice: Retrospective Examination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The use of telemedicine (TELE) increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic. While patient experience with TELE has been studied in other medical disciplines, its impact and applicability to integrative medicine practices remain unknown. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to assess the impact of visit modality, TELE versus face-to-face (F2F) encounters, on patient experience at an integrative medicine practice at a single academic medical center. Given the significant role of the patient-physician relationship, therapeutic presence, and touch in integrative medicine, we hypothesized that TELE would result in reduced patient experience compared to traditional F2F encounters. METHODS: A retrospective examination of Press Ganey surveys at an academic, consultative, and integrative medicine practice was conducted. Anonymous surveys completed by patients, older than 18 years of age, who had TELE or F2F appointments from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2023, were included. At our medical center, patients commonly travel in from out of state for complex care. We examined percentage "top box" scores (ie, the percentage of respondents who selected the most positive response category on the survey, "very good"), across a variety of experience metrics. ANOVA and chi-square analyses were completed, with a significance threshold of P<.05. RESULTS: Over the 36 months, a total of 1066 surveys were completed and returned (TELE: n=333; F2F: n=733). Overall, 73% (n=778) of respondents were female with an average age of 57.6 (SD 13.84) years. Most patients were English-speaking (n=728, 99.3%), White (n=1059, 92.7%), and not Hispanic or Latino (n=985, 92.4%). There was significantly higher satisfaction with access to care for TELE visits compared to F2F visits. There were no differences in satisfaction with the care provider or in overall experience. When examining the specific aspects of using technology during TELE visits, there were no differences in audio quality, visual quality, or ease of talking to the care provider based on sex. There was, however, a difference in video quality based on age, where those 80 years and older rated significantly lower video quality compared to all other age groups. CONCLUSIONS: Top-level patient experience can be attained with TELE integrative medicine visits. Additional studies, particularly those correlating positive experience findings with specific behaviors used during TELE visits, would further our understanding of the integrative medicine patient experience. In the meantime, efforts should be made to ensure a policy that promotes the ongoing provision of TELE in integrative medicine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".