Ishikawa Tomoki, Sato Jumpei, Hattori Junko, Goda Kazuo, Kitsuregawa Masaru, Mitsutake Naohiro
Institute for Health Economics and Policy, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
Faculty of Health Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan.
Telemed J E Health. 2024 Feb;30(2):509-517. doi: 10.1089/tmj.2023.0118. Epub 2023 Aug 17.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a decrease in demand for medical services in Japan, but the utilization of telehealth, which the Japanese government has recently promoted, has seen a temporary increase. This study aims to analyze the trend of telehealth utilization and changes in patient characteristics following the policy response to COVID-19. This retrospective study analyzed data from 26,152 adult patients who used telehealth for the first time between April 2019 and April 2021 in Mie Prefecture, Japan. An interrupted time series analysis was conducted to evaluate changes in the number of first-time patients before and after April 2020. The number of telehealth users increased by 111.87% after April 2020, but the trend showed a declining slope thereafter. Patient characteristics and disease types showed different trends. The percentage of patients choosing a hospital over a clinic increased for the first time. After the policy response to COVID-19, the number of first-time telehealth users overall increased immediately, but gradually showed a declining trend. However, some diseases have shown both an immediate increase and a continued upward trend in telehealth utilization. Patients with these diseases may be candidates for adopting telehealth services in clinical settings.
新冠疫情导致日本医疗服务需求下降，但日本政府近期推动的远程医疗利用率出现了暂时增长。本研究旨在分析新冠疫情应对政策实施后远程医疗的使用趋势以及患者特征的变化。这项回顾性研究分析了2019年4月至2021年4月期间在日本三重县首次使用远程医疗的26152名成年患者的数据。进行了中断时间序列分析，以评估2020年4月前后首次就诊患者数量的变化。2020年4月后，远程医疗用户数量增长了111.87%，但此后趋势呈下降斜率。患者特征和疾病类型呈现出不同趋势。选择医院而非诊所的患者比例首次上升。在对新冠疫情做出政策响应后，首次使用远程医疗的用户数量总体上立即增加，但随后逐渐呈下降趋势。然而，一些疾病的远程医疗利用率既出现了立即增长，也呈现出持续上升趋势。患有这些疾病的患者可能是临床环境中采用远程医疗服务的候选对象。
