The American journal of managed care
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To determine whether physician-to-physician outpatient asynchronous store-and-forward teledermatology can be a portal for patient access to consultative dermatologic care and decrease primary care physician referrals to dermatology. ⋯ Physician-to-physician outpatient asynchronous teledermatology consults can provide a model for rapid consultation and decreased primary care referral to dermatology.
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With a rapid shift to telehealth during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, clinicians, health care organizations, and policy makers must consider and address patients' evolving needs, concerns, and expectations.
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The telehealth policy changes enacted for short-term control of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic present an opportunity to address the fundamental gap in health care underutilization.
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Health care organizations are increasingly employing social workers to address patients' social needs. However, social work (SW) activities in health care settings are largely captured as text data within electronic health records (EHRs), making measurement and analysis difficult. This study aims to extract and classify, from EHR notes, interventions intended to address patients' social needs using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms. ⋯ NLP and ML can be utilized for automated identification and classification of SW interventions documented in EHRs. Health care administrators can leverage this automated approach to gain better insight into the most needed social interventions in the patient population served by their organizations. Such information can be applied in managerial decisions related to SW staffing, resource allocation, and patients' social needs.
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Electronic consultations, or e-consults, between primary care providers and specialists have been shown to improve access to specialty care, shorten wait times, and reduce outpatient visits. The objective of this study was to evaluate differences in health care costs between patients who received an electronic specialty consultation and patients who received a face-to-face specialty consultation. ⋯ Electronic specialty consultations are a potential mechanism to reduce health care costs and promote the efficient use of health care resources.