Telemedicine improved doctors’ quality of patient care during COVID pandemic, new research shows

We all remember when the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020 upended the comfort of our daily routines. Businesses were forced to adapt to limited ways of engaging with customers, with varied levels of success.

Lockdown posed a unique challenge for physicians: they couldn't meet with every patient in person. Telemedicine became not only an alternative but the best option for seeing patients in remote areas or where infection rates were high.

New research involving Binghamton University's School of Management highlights a positive impact of that shift. The study found that telemedicine enhances the quality of patient care as expected but also increases physician satisfaction in delivering that care. As pandemic restrictions have eased, researchers noted, telemedicine will likely continue to be a preferred option in the years to come.

"Before the pandemic, face-to-face doctor's visits were a norm, and physicians used telemedicine sparingly, not widely considering it a mainstream practice. This is true since most physicians were trained without exposure to telemedicine tools," said Sumantra Sarkar, the associate professor at SOM who worked on the study. "During pandemic times, they felt uncomfortable and overwhelmed by the need to learn new techniques and tools for providing telemedicine. Being forced to provide telemedicine at the height of the pandemic, physicians were especially overloaded, which led to burnout."

Sarkar and his fellow researchers wanted to examine whether telemedicine could affect physician satisfaction and, hopefully, reduce burnout.

"COVID really broke previously seen limitations with what could be done through telemedicine," Sarkar added, "and this study is one of the earliest to examine physician satisfaction and its effects on quality of care and patient visits during COVID."

The study centered on data from the 2021 annual National Electronic Health Records Survey, which included 10,302 questionnaire responses from physicians nationwide. Of those responses, 1,875 physicians answered one or more telemedicine-related questions.

Based on those responses, Sarkar and his fellow researchers evaluated the effects of specific telemedicine features on physicians' satisfaction, quality of care and percentage of patients' visits.

Sarkar said the results proved consistent with those of prior studies, including one demonstrating that 65% of surveyed physicians were satisfied with the patient relationship during telemedicine visits. However, those prior studies didn't consider the variations in telemedicine features that Sarkar and his colleagues examined in theirs.

Features that contributed significantly to physician satisfaction included videoconferencing and telemedicine platforms integrated with electronic health records. Given the long-held tradition of face-to-face doctor's visits, Sarkar said it was understandable that there would have been some initial reservations about adopting this technology.

"We thought there would be more resistance from doctors to use telemedicine, so it's possible that in the times of COVID, they found it beneficial because they could at least serve their patients by going around the in-person constraints we had," Sarkar said. "If telemedicine usage is to continue, then we need to keep understanding how it impacts physicians. We know it can reduce costs tremendously; imagine patients traveling 100 miles for a doctor when you could use telemedicine options that have proven to work."

The study, "The relationship between telemedicine tools and physician satisfaction, quality of care, and patient visits during the COVID-19 pandemic," was published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.