Telemedicine improved doctors’ quality of patient care during the Covid pandemic, according to research involving Binghamton University’s School of Management in New York.

During the Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020, physicians couldn’t meet with every patient in person. Telemedicine became not only an alternative but the best option for seeing patients in remote areas or where infection rates were high.

The research (www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1386505624002041) involving the School of Management (www.binghamton.edu/som) highlighted a positive impact of that shift. The study found telemedicine enhanced the quality of patient care as expected but also increased physician satisfaction in delivering that care. As pandemic restrictions have eased, researchers said telemedicine would likely continue to be a preferred option in the years to come.

“Before the pandemic, face-to-face doctor’s visits were a norm, and physicians used telemedicine sparingly, not widely considering it a mainstream practice,” said Sumantra Sarkar, associate professor at the School of Management. “This is true since most physicians were trained without exposure to telemedicine tools. During pandemic times, they felt uncomfortable and overwhelmed by the need to learn new techniques and tools for providing telemedicine. Being forced to provide telemedicine at the height of the pandemic, physicians were especially overloaded, which led to burnout.”

Sarkar and his fellow researchers wanted to examine whether telemedicine could affect physician satisfaction and, hopefully, reduce burnout.

“Covid really broke previously seen limitations with what could be done through telemedicine,” Sarkar said, “and this study is one of the earliest to examine physician satisfaction and its effects on quality of care and patient visits during Covid.”

The study centred on data from the 2021 annual National Electronic Health Records Survey, which included 10,302 questionnaire responses from physicians across the USA. Of those responses, 1875 physicians answered one or more telemedicine-related questions.

Based on those responses, the researchers evaluated the effects of specific telemedicine features on physicians’ satisfaction, quality of care and percentage of patients’ visits.

Sarkar said the results proved consistent with those of prior studies, including one demonstrating that 65% of surveyed physicians were satisfied with the patient relationship during telemedicine visits. However, those prior studies didn’t consider the variations in telemedicine features that Sarkar and his colleagues examined in theirs.

Features that contributed significantly to physician satisfaction included videoconferencing and telemedicine platforms integrated with electronic health records. Given the long-held tradition of face-to-face doctor’s visits, Sarkar said it was understandable there would have been some initial reservations about adopting this technology.

“We thought there would be more resistance from doctors to use telemedicine, so it’s possible that in the times of Covid they found it beneficial because they could at least serve their patients by going around the in-person constraints we had,” Sarkar said. “If telemedicine usage is to continue, then we need to keep understanding how it impacts physicians. We know it can reduce costs tremendously; imagine patients traveling 100 miles for a doctor when you could use telemedicine options that have proven to work.”

The study – “The relationship between telemedicine tools and physician satisfaction, quality of care, and patient visits during the Covid-19 pandemic” – was published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.