What Has Become of the Patients?

Frontline physicians are reporting a mysterious phenomenon—as hospitals began preparing for and in some cases started receiving an onslaught of COVID-19 patients, patients with other conditions such as heart attacks, stroke, and appendicitis became a rarity. Where, asks the New York Times, are all the patients?

While much of the evidence about declining hospitalization rates is anecdotal, hard data are emerging.The information from disparate sources now strongly suggests that the decline in hospitalization for heart attacks, strokes, and other potentially treatable serious medical problems is real. 

Assuming that the rate at which Americans develop these problems has remained unchanged, and there’s no reason to believe otherwise, the logical conclusion is that patients are staying home. Given this likelihood, the important question to ask is not where are the patients. It’s what’s happening to them? Are they dying? Are they surviving but with significant, avoidable deficits? Or are they doing just fine? And why did they stay home? Were they terrified of going to the hospital, worried about contracting COVID-19, and did not even call their doctor for advice, as is generally assumed? Or did they try, unsuccessfully, to contact a physician by phone or video? Might they have succeeded in reaching a physician but were given poor advice?

We urgently need to investigate the fate of these patients who are performing an uncontrolled natural experiment in home vs hospital care. Physicians tend to assume that the problem is that patients are self-diagnosing and self-treating—to their detriment. But we may find some surprises, both in terms of why patients are staying home and what is happening to them. We might discover that some patients tried to obtain advice and for a variety of reasons were not directed to the emergency department. And we may learn that the outcomes varied, with some patients dying, others surviving but suffering needlessly, and still others doing just fine. While drawing robust conclusions will be challenging because of a lack of a randomized control population, interviews may enable to learn something about the factors that shaped patient behavior and contributed to outcomes.

Telemedicine has to a large extent replaced person to person visits during the COVID-19 epidemic. As a result, when we blame patients for their failure to go to the hospital, we are implicitly assuming that the flaw is in the patients and not in telemedicine. But such a conclusion is too facile. Maybe part of the responsibility lies with the limitations of telemedicine. Maybe telemedicine is an art that physicians need to master, and maybe patients need to be educated about how best to make use of telemedicine.

Consider this analogy: physicians used to believe that anyone trained to take care of patients in the hospital setting automatically knew how to care for them in the office. Only relatively recently did educators suggest that outpatient medicine requires different knowledge and skills from inpatient medicine. As a result, residency programs today have a much larger and more robust outpatient component than did their predecessors 30 years ago. The recognition that patient engagement in their own medical care positively affects outcomes likewise led to a change in the way that primary care physicians are supposed to practice medicine. 

Teaching both physicians and patients how best to utilize telemedicine will also require that learning more about the barriers to the use of telemedicine in the primary care setting—are people who do not have a computer or smartphone simply not contacting their physician? Do older people who have been unable to learn to make a video call assume that telemedicine is unavailable to them? What about on the physician side? Are all primary care physicians using Zoom or its analogs?

Once we have identified and rectified the barriers to use (no mean feat), we will need to figure out how to optimize use of this technology. Patients may have to be equipped with the means to measure their own blood pressure, temperature, and oxygen saturation to be able to provide physicians with crucial data. Physicians may have to learn to ask patients to check for peripheral edema or other signs of illness, and they may need to rely on third parties (home health aides or family caregivers) to provide additional information.

At the same time, we need to clarify whether sick people are currently underutilizing hospitals (the widespread assumption) or whether they were previously over-using hospitals. While there is ample evidence that hospitals have a great deal to offer patients with conditions such as heart attacks and appendicitis, there is also extensive data suggesting that many medical treatments are over- prescribed.

Over the short run, we need to get out the word that hospitals are open for business and have the capacity and the ability to care for patients with all kinds of acute problems, not just COVID-19 pneumonia. But over the long run, we need to learn how and when to best use both telemedicine and hospital care.

The Doctor is On Line

The Commonwealth Fund just released a study reporting on primary care office visits in the COVID-19 era and it’s disturbing. In-person office visits fell by 60 percent in March and remained down to nearly the same extent in April. While telemedicine substituted for some of these visits, it did not come anywhere near to compensating for the decline. 

Clearly the precipitous fall is disastrous for primary care medicine, which has seen one practice after another furlough physicians or close altogether, but it also bodes ill for patients. While some of those vanishing visits were probably unnecessary or could easily be postponed, there is reasonably good evidence for the efficacy of robust primary care medicine in improving health and increasing longevity. What can we do about this problem—apart from eradicating COVID-19?

            

The popular answer is to increase the use of telemedicine. Telemedicine—principally video calls by patients to physicians that allow both parties to remain home—have had considerable successes: Jefferson Health has made extensive use of the technology to screen for COVID-19, to enhance prevention and, to some extent, to treat common conditions. The use of telemedicine has been rising dramatically, with some analysts reporting a 50 percent increase since March and others predicting a billion remote visits by the end of 2020. Moreover, the regulatory changes introduced by Medicare to facilitate billing for telemedicine visits have had a major beneficial impact. 

But before we get carried away, we should consider who is not currently using the technology and what adaptations will be necessary to maximize its efficacy. I worry that older people in general and the oldest old in particular are not availing themselves of telemedicine, despite having the greatest need. Older patients who are poor, have little education, or are non-English speakers are at the greatest disadvantage of all. But to assume that the only barrier to effective utilization is lack of access strikes me as naïve: surely new skills and a new approach will be necessary, both on the part of physicians and of patients.

First, the barriers to access. My mother is 94. She is intelligent, she has a master’s degree in social work, and she owns a computer and a tablet, both of which she uses to read her email. But video calling is just beyond her. I’ve tried FaceTime and Zoom. I sat with her (in the days when I was able to do so) and coached her. I’ve attempted to walk her through the process while we are on the phone together. No luck. And she is not unique. Her friends have not been able to master this skill either. Generations on Line, an organization which for decades has been trying to improve digital literacy in the elderly, identifies three obstacles: lack of access (not an issue with my mother or most of her friends), lack of skill, and intimidation. She is convinced she cannot learn to use this technology. “I’m not made for this century,” she tells me and she is not alone in her conviction.

Now consider all the older people who do not have a computer or a tablet. Internet use has been steadily rising in those over age 65 and is now about 73 percent—but among those age 80 or older, it’s only 44 percent. And use falls further with lower income and lower levels of education. 

Then think about those who are hearing impaired—you might imagine that the computer's capacity for amplification would be a benefit of the technology, but for many people with hearing loss, the main problem is discrimination, the ability to distinguish different sounds, and that does not disappear with amplification. Next, throw in non-English speakers. Good systems are available for dial-in interpreters, which works well in the office setting, when the patient and the physician are in physical proximity, but is more challenging when a three-way video call is required. Until these barriers are overcome, telemedicine will be limited to telephone calls in those who are neediest and most vulnerable. 

Even if we could wave a magic wand and all older people would have a computer, smartphone, or tablet and broadband access and the ability to use the device to communicate with their physician, we would still need to address the issue of reaching the doctor in a timely fashion. If telemedicine is supposed to replace urgent care as well as evaluation of new, slightly less acute problems along with chronic disease management, then we will need a systematic way to triage visits. 

If all older people could communicate with the physician via the internet promptly and effectively, there would remain the question of the substance of that interaction. Medical students are taught that a good clinical history results in (presumably correct) diagnosis 80 percent of the time. But a more sophisticated analysis suggests that how likely the history is to prove adequate depends on the prior probability of the condition—that is, if a patient is extremely likely to have pneumonia, then a physical examination or chest x-ray has relatively little to add to the history, but if the chance of pneumonia is small, then these other modalities can add significantly. For telemedicine to be effective, we will need to compensate for the lack of a physical exam and lab tests.

Video adds an important dimension to the visit—physicians can learn a great deal, for example, from observing if the patient is struggling to breathe or has blue-tinged lips. But even in dermatology, physicians rely on touch as well as vision to evaluate a rash. To maximize the effectiveness of telemedicine, patients will need to be able to provide their physicians with critical data. They will have to have a thermometer at home to report their temperature. They should have an electronic home sphygmomanometer to measure blood pressure and, ideally, a pulse oximeter to measure the amount of oxygen in their blood. They should know how to check their pulse (though typically home blood pressure cuffs will do this) and respiratory rate. Obtaining the necessary equipment and learning to use it should be feasible, but it will take time and effort.

Lastly, physicians will need to tailor their approach to a visit to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of the technological medium on which it is based. A video visit is not identical to an office visit, which in turn is not the same as hospital care. Just as physicians discovered that they could not simply extrapolate from inpatient medicine to the outpatient setting but rather had to learn different strategies for caring for ambulatory patients, similarly they will need to adapt to the brave new world of telemedicine. 

Over the long run, the adaptation will be worthwhile. Better home care can lead to fewer hospitalizations. Fewer hospitalizations means better outcomes for frail older patients: they were at risk of adverse consequences of hospitalization (falls, confusion, decline in self-care ability) long before they were at risk of COVID-19. But we have a long way to go.