Publication date: Jun 25, 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated adoption of telemedicine in cardiology clinics. Early in the pandemic, there were sociodemographic disparities in telemedicine use. It is unknown if these disparities persisted and whether they were associated with changes in the population of patients accessing care. We examined all adult cardiology visits at an academic and an affiliated community practice in Northern California from March 2019 to February 2020 (pre-COVID) and March 2020 to February 2021 (COVID). We compared patient sociodemographic characteristics between these periods. We used logistic regression to assess the association of patient/visit characteristics with visit modality (in-person vs telemedicine and video- vs phone-based telemedicine) during the COVID period. There were 54,948 pre-COVID and 58,940 COVID visits. Telemedicine use increased from
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| California | age |
| Cardiology | cardiology |
| February | COVID-19 |
| Pandemic | ethnic |
| healthcare disparities | |
| language | |
| racial | |
| socioeconomic | |
| telemedicine |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 pandemic |
| disease | VO | population |