Improved outpatient medical visit compliance with sociodemographic discrepancies in vascular telehealth evaluations

Ali, Adham N. Abou; Malak, Othman M. Abdul; Hafeez, Muhammad Saad; Habib, Salim; Cherfan, Patrick; Salem, Karim M.; Hager, Eric; Avgerinos, Efthymios D.; Sridharan, Natalie

doi:10.1016/j.jvs.2022.11.039

Cited by 3 publications

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References 20 publications

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“…Virtual visits also provide overall shorter time commitment with median overall postoperative visit time being 27.5 min shorter [ 24 ]. A vascular surgery clinic found that patients were 2.3 times more likely to complete virtual postoperative visits compared to in-person visits [ 25 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The environmental impact of surgical telemedicine: life cycle assessment of virtual vs. in-person preoperative evaluations for benign foregut disease

et al. 2023

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Background Health care accounts for almost 10% of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for a loss of 470,000 disability-adjusted life years based on the health effects of climate change. Telemedicine has the potential to decrease health care’s carbon footprint by reducing patient travel and clinic-related emissions. At our institution, telemedicine visits for evaluation of benign foregut disease were implemented for patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to estimate the environmental impact of telemedicine usage for these clinic encounters. Methods We used life cycle assessment (LCA) to compare greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for an in-person and a telemedicine visit. For in-person visits, travel distances to clinic were retrospectively assessed from 2020 visits as a representative sample, and prospective data were gathered on materials and processes related to in-person clinic visits. Prospective data on the length of telemedicine encounters were collected and environmental impact was calculated for equipment and internet usage. Upper and lower bounds scenarios for emissions were generated for each type of visit. Results For in-person visits, 145 patient travel distances were recorded with a median [IQR] distance travel distance of 29.5 [13.7, 85.1] miles resulting in 38.22–39.61 carbon dioxide equivalents (kgCO 2 -eq) emitted. For telemedicine visits, the mean (SD) visit time was 40.6 (17.1) min. Telemedicine GHG emissions ranged from 2.26 to 2.99 kgCO 2 -eq depending on the device used. An in-person visit resulted in 25 times more GHG emissions compared to a telemedicine visit ( p < 0.001). Conclusion Telemedicine has the potential to decrease health care’s carbon footprint. Policy changes to facilitate telemedicine use are needed, as well as increased awareness of potential disparities of and barriers to telemedicine use. Moving toward telemedicine preoperative evaluations in appropriate surgical populations is a purposeful step toward actively addressing our role in health care’s large carbon footprint.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The environmental impact of surgical telemedicine: life cycle assessment of virtual vs. in-person preoperative evaluations for benign foregut disease

et al. 2023

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Systematic Review of Telemedicine and eHealth Systems Applied to Vascular Surgery

et al. 2022

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Objective: The objective of this paper is to review and analyze the current state of telemedicine and ehealth in the field of vascular surgery. Methods: This paper collects the relevant information obtained after reviewing the articles related to telemedicine in vascular surgery, published from 2012 to 2022 contained in scientific databases. In addition, the results obtained are statistically studied based on various factors, such as the year of publication or the search engine. In this way, we obtain a complete vision of the current state of telemedicine in the field of vascular surgery. Results: After performing this search and applying selection criteria, 29 articles were obtained for subsequent study and discussion, of which 20 were published in the second half of the decade, representing 70% of the results. In the analysis carried out according to the search criteria used, it can be seen that using the word telemedicine we obtained 69% of the articles while with the criteria mHealth and eHealth we only obtained 22% and 9% of the results, respectively. It can be seen that the filter with the most potential content articles was “vascular surgery AND telemedicine”. In the analysis performed according to the search engine, it was observed that the Google Scholar database contains 93% of the articles found in the massive search and the relevant articles contained therein represent 52% of the total. Conclusion: An upward trend has been observed in recent years, with a clear increase in the number of publications and much lower figures in the first years. One aspect to highlight is that 47.8% of the articles analyzed focus only on postoperative treatment, which may be due to the help provided by telemedicine in detecting surgical site infections by sending images and videos, this being one of the most common postoperative complications. The analyzed works show the importance of telemedicine in vascular surgery and identify possible future lines of research. In the analysis carried out on the origin of the selected relevant papers, an important interest of the US in this topic is demonstrated since more than 50% of the research contains authors from this country, it is also observed that there is no research from Spain, so this research would be an initial step to determine the weaknesses of telemedicine in this field of medicine and a good opportunity to open a research gap in this branch.

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Telemedicine Use Decreases the Carbon Footprint of the Bariatric Surgery Preoperative Evaluation

et al. 2023

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Improved outpatient medical visit compliance with sociodemographic discrepancies in vascular telehealth evaluations

Cited by 3 publications

References 20 publications

The environmental impact of surgical telemedicine: life cycle assessment of virtual vs. in-person preoperative evaluations for benign foregut disease

The environmental impact of surgical telemedicine: life cycle assessment of virtual vs. in-person preoperative evaluations for benign foregut disease

Systematic Review of Telemedicine and eHealth Systems Applied to Vascular Surgery

Telemedicine Use Decreases the Carbon Footprint of the Bariatric Surgery Preoperative Evaluation

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