An evaluation of telehealth services at New York City tuberculosis clinics throughout the COVID-19 pandemic

Grace E Gao, Alice V Easton, Marco M Salerno, Matthew Angulo, Claudia Buchanan, Deandra J Ingram, Erica Humphrey, Marci Whitehead, Errol Robinson, Christine Chuck, Joseph Burzynski, Felicia Dworkin, Diana Nilsen and Michelle Macaraig

PLOS Digital Health, 2025, vol. 4, issue 6, 1-14

Abstract: In March 2020, three New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Tuberculosis (TB) clinics suspended most in-person services due to the COVID-19 pandemic and rapidly implemented telehealth to provide remote TB care. We conducted a prospective cohort study of patients with TB or latent TB infection (LTBI), who received treatment from TB clinics between April 2020 and December 2022, to compare telehealth and in-clinic services. To evaluate the success and breadth of the telehealth program, we compared patients who utilized telehealth with those who did not, analyzing differences in demographic characteristics and key outcomes, including utilization of telehealth, appointment completion, and treatment completion. “Telehealth patients” completed at least one scheduled telehealth visit during the study period. We conducted bivariate analyses comparing telehealth versus in-clinic patients. 56% (497/885) of patients with TB and 45% (954/2127) of patients with LTBI had a telehealth visit. Among patients with TB, no disparities in proportions of telehealth and in-clinic patients were observed for age (p = 0.31) or primary language spoken (p = 0.37). Among patients with LTBI, younger patients were more likely to use telehealth (p

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig.0000898 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article/fi ... 00898&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pdig00:0000898

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0000898

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Digital Health from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by digitalhealth ().