Liu Songzi, Edson Barbara, Gianforcaro Robert, Saif Khairat
The School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Virtual Care Center, UNC Healthcare, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2020 Mar 4;2019:1139-1148. eCollection 2019.
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.
在评估远程医疗干预措施的特点和性能时，大多数研究都采用以患者为中心的方法，而没有考虑远程医疗提供者的角色。因此，人们对远程医疗医生的人口统计学特征和处方模式知之甚少，而了解这些知识对于全面评估虚拟责任医疗服务的提供至关重要。为了填补这一空白，我们的研究使用多变量分析方法，探讨了医生的特质和特定诊疗情况的特征与处方结果之间的相关性。我们观察并分析了亚组中医生处方行为的显著差异。虚拟紧急护理医生的平均处方可能性为69%，平均处方数量为0.98；男性医生和初级保健提供者开具处方的频率更高，开具的药物数量也更多。这项研究提请人们关注远程医疗提供者处方决策的质量和可重复性，并警告说，可能缺乏明确的虚拟医疗服务实践指南。
