Description
When assessing the characteristics and performance of telemedicine interventions, most studies followed a patient-centric approach, leaving the telemedicine providers’ role out of consideration. As a result, little was known about the demographics and prescription pattern of telemedicine physicians, the knowledge of which is integral to a holistic evaluation of the virtual delivery of accountable care. To fill this gap, our study explored how physicians’ traits and encounter-specific characteristics correlate with prescription outcomes, using multivariate analyses. Significant inter-physician variation in prescription behaviors was observed and analyzed in sub-groups. The average Virtual Urgent Care physician’s prescription likelihood was 69% with a mean prescription count of 0.98; male physicians and primary care providers tended to prescribe both more often and with a greater number of medications. This study called attention to the quality and reproducibility of telemedicine providers’ prescription decision and warned the likely absence of well-defined practice guidelines for delivering virtual care.
Learning Objective: After participating in this session, the learner should be better able to:
1. Learn the prescribing behaviors of telemedicine physicians.
2. Identify the likely determinants of an individual physician’s likelihood to prescribe and the number of medications prescribed at a virtual encounter.
3. Understand the challenges behind evaluating the appropriateness and reproducibility of telemedicine physicians’ prescription outcomes.
4. Formulate an approach to integrate physicians’ performance into the overall evaluation of telemedicine outcomes.
Authors:
Songzi Liu (Presenter)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Barbara Edson, UNC Healthcare
Robert Gianforcaro, UNC Healthcare
Saif Khairat, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Presentation Materials: