Inflammatory Bowel Disease Hospitalizations are Similar for Patients Receiving Tele-Visit Delivered Outpatient Care and Those Receiving Traditional In-Person Care.

Cohen-Mekelburg S, Valicevic A, Lin L, Saini SD, Kim HM, Adams MA. Inflammatory Bowel Disease Hospitalizations are Similar for Patients Receiving Tele-Visit Delivered Outpatient Care and Those Receiving Traditional In-Person Care. The American journal of gastroenterology. 2024 Feb 5.

Dimensions for VA is a web-based tool available to VA staff that enables detailed searches of published research and research projects.

If you have VA-Intranet access, click here for more information vaww.hsrd.research.va.gov/dimensions/

VA staff not currently on the VA network can access Dimensions by registering for an account using their VA email address.    Search Dimensions for VA for this citation
* Don't have VA-internal network access or a VA email address? Try searching the free-to-the-public version of Dimensions

Search for Abstract from PubMed

---

Abstract:

OBJECTIVES: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in widespread expansion of telehealth. However, there are concerns that telehealth-delivered outpatient care may limit opportunities for managing complications and preventing hospitalizations for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). We aimed to assess the association between outpatient IBD care delivered via tele-visit (video or phone) and IBD-related hospitalizations. METHODS: We conducted a case-control study of patients with IBD who had an IBD-related index hospitalization between April 2021-July 2022 and received their care in the Veterans Health Administration. We matched these hospitalized patients to controls who were not hospitalized based on age, sex, race, Charlson comorbidity index, IBD type, IBD-related emergency department use, IBD-related hospitalizations, and outpatient gastroenterology visits in the preceding year. The variable of interest was the percentage of total clinic visits delivered via tele-visit in the year prior to the index hospitalization. We compared risk of IBD-related hospitalization by exposure to tele-visit delivered care using conditional logistic regression. RESULTS: We identified 534 patients with an IBD-related hospitalization and 534 matched controls without an IBD-related hospitalization during the study period. Patients with IBD with a higher percentage of tele-visit delivered (vs in-person) outpatient care were less likely to be hospitalized during the study period (for every 10% increase in tele-visit use, odds ratio 0.97, 95% confidence interval 0.94-1.00;p = 0.03). CONCLUSIONS: Tele-visit delivered outpatient IBD care is not associated with higher risk of IBD-related hospitalization. These findings may reassure clinicians that tele-visit-delivered outpatient care is appropriate for patients with complex chronic diseases such as IBD.