LAUSR

To the Editor: The novel coronavirus or severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic called for a rapid adoption of telehealth service across all health systems in the United States to limit virus exposure to patients and health providers. As our colleagues at other institutions are also transforming the traditional in-person visits to virtual visits, we would like to share our experience and begin a national dialogue for what a high-quality virtual visit would entail. Herein, we share our experience in providing telehealth for patients in a geriatric primary care clinic. We provide an overview of features we implemented to enhance the visit experience. Our multisite geriatric clinic, which provides more than 300 primary and geriatric specialty visits weekly within an academic healthcare system, moved quickly to transform most of in-person clinical appointments to virtual care format. In the course of 5 weeks, by eliminating nonurgent in-person visits and rapid implementation of virtual care, we ramped up from zero to 91% of total geriatric primary and outpatient specialty care visits (Figure 1). Virtual care transformation was made possible by institutional commitment, as well as efforts by individual physicians, office staff, information technology specialist, and patients and caregivers. First, within geriatrics, we identified videoconferencing platforms available to our providers. Before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, our healthcare system had adopted Epic as its electronic health record (EHR) system, which allows for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)–compliant video visits. The Epic integrated video visits involve several requirements: (1) providers must set up specific applications on Apple branded smartphone or tablets and (2) patients are required to have online patient portal account through Epic and download the health patient portal application; many patients had not completed either one or both of these steps. To address these limitations, the healthcare system quickly deployed Epic “superusers” to help physicians set up the application for video visits. Each physician reviewed his/her patients scheduled for clinic visits 2 to 3 weeks in advance and designated the need for each visit as nonurgent (reschedule), urgent virtual, or urgent in-person visit. The initial goal in the third week of March was to eliminate in-person visits simply by rescheduling. But by April, we encouraged providers to convert to virtual visits and clinic staff contacted all the patients to offer virtual visits. We quickly learned ways to telecommunicate with staff in real-time for scheduling virtual visits, and physicians were able to self-schedule virtual visits due to a newly upgraded feature in the EHR. By mid-April, the Epic platform enabled providers to launch virtual care even from non-Apple devices. For patients, we have expanded to a HIPAA-compliant chatroom format, Zoom Health, which entails only clicking on a web link and can accommodate multiple family members joining from remote locations. Our administrative staff and medical assistants shared responsibility to assist patients with the technology and to collect previsit clinical information. Initially, most of our patients were reluctant to install video-capable applications onto their smartphones and tablets; thus, our patientsʼ preference of telephone visits over video visits is not surprising, given that nearly 50% of adults aged 50 to 80 years surveyed in a national sample expressed concern for difficulty using the technology for telehealth. Anecdotally, the chatroom format facilitated family and caregivers to help the patients log on at the designated time. We recognized that the leading concern about telehealth visits among older adults is that healthcare providers would not be able to do a system-based physical examination (71% in a national survey). We have summarized our adaptation of the virtual examination (Table 1), using the four basic components: inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation. Several strategies facilitated our visits: (1) Patient or caregiver involvement. Before the visit, our staff asked if patients could self-measure home blood pressure (BP), pulse, body weight, temperature, and fingerstick glucose, if appropriate. With virtual visits scaling up, the health system Figure 1 Increasing use of telephone and video virtual care after Michigan shelter-in-place order. Weekly trends in geriatric outpatient visits, by in-person vs virtual formats, showing a steep increase in telephone virtual care vs a slower uptake in video visits. The baseline proportion before the Michigan state order to shelter in place on March 13, 2020 (black vertical dashed line), is indicated by the blue horizontal line at 100% for in-person visits, and maroon and green dashed lines for virtual formats at 0%. The x axis indicates the week (beginning date) and the total number of visits in parentheses. The 95% confidence intervals are indicated around each proportion and were obtained using the three-part categorical outcome for type of visit with week as the only categorical predictor (Stata 14.2).