1. Impact of COVID-19 outbreak on the care of patients with inflammatory bowel disease: A comparison before and after the outbreak in South China.
- Author
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Zhang YF, Qiu Y, He JS, Tan JY, Li XZ, Zhu LR, Chen Y, Liu ZJ, Iacucci M, Chen BL, He Y, Ben-Horin S, Shen B, Zeng ZR, Ghosh S, Chen MH, and Mao R
- Subjects
- China epidemiology, Disease Outbreaks, Health Care Rationing trends, Humans, Retrospective Studies, Attitude of Health Personnel, Attitude to Health, COVID-19 epidemiology, COVID-19 prevention & control, Health Services Accessibility trends, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases therapy, Practice Patterns, Physicians' trends, Telemedicine trends
- Abstract
Background and Aims: Epidemics pose a great challenge to health care of patients. However, the impact of unprecedented situation of COVID-19 outbreak on health care of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients in real-world setting has seldom been investigated., Methods: We performed an observational study in a tertiary referral IBD center in China. The mode of health care and medication use was compared before and after COVID-19 outbreak. Electronic questionnaire surveys were performed among gastroenterologists and IBD patients to investigate the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on their attitudes towards telemedicine., Results: COVID-19 outbreak resulted in substantial decrease of patients participating in standard face-to-face visit during 1 month post-outbreak (n = 51) than pre-outbreak (n = 249), whereas the participation in telemedicine was significantly higher than comparable period in 2019 (414 vs 93). During the 1 month after COVID-19 outbreak, 39 (39/56, 69.6%) patients had their infliximab infusion postponed with the mean delay of 3 weeks. The immunomodulator use was similar between pre-outbreak and post-outbreak. Six elective surgeries were postponed for a median of 43 days. In post-outbreak period, 193 (193/297, 64.98%) of the surveyed physicians have used telemedicine with an increase of 18.9% compared with 46.13% (137/292) in the pre-outbreak period (P < 0.001); 331 (331/505, 65.54%) of the surveyed IBD patients supported that the use of telemedicine should be increased in future health care., Conclusion: COVID-19 outbreak resulted in a great change in health-care access among IBD patients including decrease in standard face-to-face visit and delay of biologics use. There was an increased use and need of telemedicine after COVID-19 outbreak., (© 2020 Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology Foundation and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.)
- Published
- 2021
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