Favorable Clinician Acceptability of Telehealth as Part of the Cystic Fibrosis Care Model during the COVID-19 Pandemic
R. Perkins, Jaclyn Davis, A Nesmith, Julianna Bailey, Michael R. Powers, Nauman Chaudary, Christopher Siracusa, Ahmet Uluer, George M. Solomon, Gregory S. Sawicki
Abstract
To the Editor:The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic impacted healthcare delivery in the United States and around the world.Constraints surrounding personal protective equipment and the need for social distancing (1) to minimize disease spread led to the rapid adoption of telehealth to continue patient care.Telehealth has been implemented across many specialties (1-9) and championed as a measure to increase access in medically underserved or rural locations (10).Although telehealth may be as effective as in-person care (11,12), it is already associated with high patient satisfaction (2, 13), convenience (3), cost-effectiveness (3, 11), and reduction in healthcare costs ( 14).Technological challenges, start-up cost, and reimbursement concerns have prevented larger-scale adoption (15).Within cystic fibrosis (CF), smaller pilot studies have described the feasibility of telehealth implementation in individual CF centers (16-18); however, the CF clinician experience has not been described.Our study aimed to characterize telehealth usage patterns, attitudes, and preferences among clinicians for future telehealth care.