Department of Dermatology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
San Juan Bautista School of Medicine, Caguas, Puerto Rico.
Pediatr Dermatol. 2021 Jul;38(4):947-949. doi: 10.1111/pde.14489. Epub 2020 Dec 27.
The rapid rise of telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic raised the prospect of worsening health care disparities for vulnerable populations. We retrospectively compared pediatric teledermatology visits scheduled during the pandemic (03/17/2020-07/31/2020) with in-person appointments scheduled during the same period in 2019 and found that Spanish-speaking patients had significantly fewer scheduled appointments in 2020 (9% vs 5%, P < .001). Among the telemedicine cohort, Spanish-speaking patients were less likely to have an email address documented within the electronic medical record and less likely to have activated an online patient portal account prior to their visit during the pandemic (45% vs 62%, P = .017, and 23% vs 66%, P < .001, respectively). Our findings suggest that email connectedness may represent a bottleneck in telemedicine access for Spanish-speaking pediatric dermatology patients.
在 COVID-19 大流行期间，远程医疗迅速兴起，这使得弱势人群的医疗保健差距进一步恶化。我们回顾性地比较了大流行期间（2020 年 3 月 17 日至 2020 年 7 月 31 日）安排的儿科远程皮肤科就诊与 2019 年同期的面对面预约，发现西班牙语患者在 2020 年的预约明显减少（9%比 5%，P<0.001）。在远程医疗队列中，西班牙语患者在电子病历中记录电子邮件地址的可能性较小，并且在大流行期间就诊之前激活在线患者门户帐户的可能性也较小（分别为 45%比 62%，P=0.017，和 23%比 66%，P<0.001）。我们的研究结果表明，电子邮件连接可能是西班牙语裔儿科皮肤科患者远程医疗服务的瓶颈。
