Temporal associations between emergency department and telehealth volumes during the COVID-19 pandemic: A time-series analysis from 2 academic medical centers.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic compelled healthcare systems to rapidly adapt to changing healthcare needs as well as identify ways to reduce COVID transmission. The relationship between pandemic-related trends in emergency department (ED) visits and telehealth urgent care visits have not been studied.

Methods: We performed an interrupted time series analysis to evaluate trends between ED visits and telehealth urgent medical care visits at two urban healthcare system in Colorado. We performed pairwise comparisons between baseline versus each COVID-19 surge and all three surges combined, for both ED and telehealth encounters at each site and used Wilcoxon rank sum test to compare median values.

Results: During the study period, 595,350 patient encounters occurred. We saw ED visits decline in correlation with rising telehealth visits during each COVID surge.

Conclusions: During initial COVID surges, ED visits declined while telehealth visits rose in inverse correlation with falling ED visits, suggesting that some patients shifted their preferred location for clinical care. As EDs cope with future staffing during the ongoing COVID pandemic, telehealth represents an opportunity for emergency physicians and a means to align patients desires for virtual care with ED volumes and staffing.