Impact of Telemedicine on Delivery of Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease Care.

OBJECTIVES: Outpatient inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) care shifted from office visits (OVs) to a model with integrated telemedicine during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. We describe the impact of this shift on delivery of pediatric IBD care. METHODS: We collected electronic medical record data from office and telemedicine visits for pediatric patients with IBD at a single center from April 2019 to December 2020. We compared visit volume, duration, and test ordering between 2019 and 2020, and between OV and telemedicine, and assessed for differences in telemedicine adoption by sociodemographic factors. RESULTS: Visit volume was maintained between 2019 and 2020. Median overall appointment time was shorter for telemedicine versus OV [46 (interquartile range, IQR 35-72) vs 62 (IQR 51-80) minutes; P < 0.001] with no significant difference in time spent with provider [28 (IQR 21-41) vs OV 30 (IQR 24-39) minutes; P = 0.08]. Accounting for drive time, telemedicine visits were 2.6 times shorter than office visits in 2020 ( P < 0.001). In univariate analyses, there was no difference in telemedicine utilization by race or gender. Variables significantly associated with telemedicine were older age, English as primary language, being non-Hispanic, commercial insurance, living in an area of very high opportunity, and having a longer drive time to the office ( P < 0.05 for all comparisons). In multivariate analyses, visits among patients with commercial insurance were significantly more likely to be conducted via telemedicine ( P = 0.02). Among those with a telemedicine visit, multivariate analyses demonstrated multiracial patients were significantly more likely to have video visits (vs audio-only; P = 0.02), while patients with public insurance, no or missing insurance, and whose primary language was Arabic were significantly less likely to have video visits ( P < 0.05 for all comparisons). CONCLUSIONS: Integrated telemedicine allowed for continued delivery of pediatric IBD care and significantly decreased appointment time. While telemedicine may improve access for those who live further from the office, concerns remain about the introduction of disparities.

Predicting emergency department visits among children with asthma in two academic medical systems.

Objective: To develop and validate a predictive algorithm that identifies pediatric patients at risk of asthma-related emergencies, and to test whether algorithm performance can be improved in an external site via local retraining.Methods: In a retrospective cohort at the first site, data from 26 008 patients with asthma aged 2-18 years (2012-2017) were used to develop a lasso-regularized logistic regression model predicting emergency department visits for asthma within one year of a primary care encounter, known as the Asthma Emergency Risk (AER) score. Internal validation was conducted on 8634 patient encounters from 2018. External validation of the AER score was conducted using 1313 pediatric patient encounters from a second site during 2018. The AER score components were then reweighted using logistic regression using data from the second site to improve local model performance. Prediction intervals (PI) were constructed via 10 000 bootstrapped samples.Results: At the first site, the AER score had a cross-validated area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.768 (95% PI: 0.745-0.790) during model training and an AUROC of 0.769 in the 2018 internal validation dataset (p = 0.959). When applied without modification to the second site, the AER score had an AUROC of 0.684 (95% PI: 0.624-0.742). After local refitting, the cross-validated AUROC improved to 0.737 (95% PI: 0.676-0.794; p = 0.037 as compared to initial AUROC).Conclusions: The AER score demonstrated strong internal validity, but external validity was dependent on reweighting model components to reflect local data characteristics at the external site.