Telemedicine rapidly expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic as people turned to their phones and computers rather than leave their homes for health care. But some groups of people were left behind in the telemedicine boom, a new study reports. Middle-aged and older folks are much less likely to complete their scheduled telemedicine visits, as well as Medicaid recipients and those whose first language is not English, the researchers said. Many groups are also unable to take part in video visits, including middle-aged folks and seniors, women, Black and Hispanic people, and those with a lower household income, according to the study authors. The pandemic has revealed a “digital divide” in telemedicine care, with some people unable to take full advantage of the service because they either lack access to the technology or find it too daunting, said lead researcher Dr. Srinath Adusumalli. He’s a cardiologist and assistant professor of clinical medicine with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. “Lots of the care we’ve historically delivered in person can be done via telemedicine, and therefore I do think telemedicine is here to stay,” Adusumalli said. “Our goal now is to start refining that process.” For this study, Adusumalli and his colleagues surveyed records for nearly 150,000 patients who scheduled telemedicine visits with Penn Medicine between mid-March and mid-May, 2020, at the height of…  read on >  read on >

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many doctors started providing care via telemedicine. Now, a new survey of people with type 1 diabetes suggests many like remote care and hope it continues in the future. Among the survey respondents who had a telemedicine visit during the pandemic, 86% found the remote appointments useful, and 75% said they planned on having remote appointments in the future, according to the Swiss study. “COVID really forced the issue of access to telemedicine. There were a lot of restrictions that made it difficult to access telemedicine in the past that were lifted with COVID. But will they remain available?” said Dr. Mary Pat Gallagher, director of the Pediatric Diabetes Center at NYU Langone Health in New York City. “It’s quite clear from my clinical experience that people really like this and would prefer it. I would like this to continue to be an option for our families,” added Gallagher, who was not involved in the current research. People with type 1 diabetes need to take multiple daily insulin shots or receive insulin via an insulin pump because they don’t make enough insulin on their own. Insulin is a hormone that ushers sugar from foods into the body’s cells for fuel. Replacing the body’s natural insulin is a balancing act, and insulin doses often need to be adjusted throughout a person’s…  read on >

Drug use is common among people taking part in virtual raves and happy hours during the coronavirus pandemic, a new study finds. “We explored whether stay-at-home orders changed how people use drugs — and it appears that drug use during virtual gatherings is somewhat prevalent among the party-going population we studied,” said study author Joseph Palamar. He’s associate professor of population health at NYU Langone Health in New York City. The researchers conducted online surveys in April and May 2020 with 128 New Yorkers who said they attend electronic dance music parties and reported recent drug use. About 56% said they had attended virtual raves and about 70% attended virtual happy hours during the pandemic. Of those, more than one-third said they had used illegal drugs during the events, including 41% of virtual rave attendees and 34% who attended virtual happy hours. Seven out of 10 participants used alcohol, and 30% said they used marijuana during both types of events, the survey found. Use of other drugs was less common. At virtual raves, about 9% used ecstasy, 7% used LSD and about 4% used cocaine. Slightly more than 3% of virtual happy hour attendees used cocaine and/or ketamine. The findings suggest that virtual dance parties and nightclub events could be an opportunity for drug use outreach and education, the researchers noted in a university news…  read on >

Cellphone activity could be used to monitor and predict spread of the new coronavirus, researchers say. They analyzed cellphone use in more than 2,700 U.S. counties between early January and early May to identify where the phones were used, including workplaces, homes, retail and grocery stores, parks and transit stations. Between 22,000 and 84,000 points of publicly available, anonymous cellphone location data were analyzed for each day in the study period. Counties with greater declines in workplace cellphone activity during stay-at-home orders had lower rates of COVID-19, according to findings published Aug. 31 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers said their findings suggest that this type of cellphone data could be used to better estimate COVID-19 growth rates and guide decisions about shutdowns and reopenings. “It is our hope that counties might be able to incorporate these publicly available cellphone data to help guide policies regarding reopening throughout different stages of the pandemic,” said senior study author Dr. Joshua Baker, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “Further, this analysis supports the incorporation of anonymized cellphone location data into modeling strategies to predict at-risk counties across the U.S. before outbreaks become too great,” he added in a university news release. Baker said it also may be possible to use cellphone data to forecast hotspots and take…  read on >

More older Americans have been seeing their doctors virtually since the pandemic began than ever before, a new poll finds. During the first three months of the pandemic, one in four patients over 50 years of age used telehealth — way up from the 4% who did so in 2019. Comfort levels with telemedicine have also risen, the researchers said. In 2019, most older people had at least one concern about telemedicine, but by mid-2020, the number of those with concerns dropped, especially among people who had a virtual visit between March and June. But not everyone is comfortable with meeting their doctor online, according to the National Poll on Healthy Aging, published online by the University of Michigan. Among those over 50, 17% still said they have never used any kind of video conferencing for any reason, including medical care. That’s 11 percentage points lower than in the 2019 poll, but lack of experience or access may still be a barrier to getting care via telemedicine. The 2019 and 2020 polls each involved a national sample of more than 2,000 U.S. adults aged 50 to 80. “These findings have implications for the health providers who have ramped up telehealth offerings rapidly, and for the insurance companies and government agencies that have quickly changed their policies to cover virtual visits,” said researcher Lorraine Buis, a…  read on >