Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Telehealth and In-Person Visits: Implications from an Emergency Department in Argentina.

Since Argentina's government declared a national emergency to combat the COVID-19 pandemic with a lockdown status, it has produced consequences on the healthcare system. We aimed to quantify the effect on the Emergency Department (ED) visits at Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires. Our electronic health data showed that ED in-person visits declined 46% during the COVID-19 pandemic, from an overall of 176,370 visits during 2019 to 95,421 visits during 2020. Simultaneously, there was a telehealth visits boom when mandatory quarantine began (March 20, 2020): from a median of 12 daily in February 2020 to a median of 338 daily in April 2020; reaching a maximum daily peak of 1,132 on March 26 2020. For a while, teleconsultations replaced ED visits. Then, when face-to-face visits began to increase, teleconsultations began to decrease slowly, as the phenomenon reversed.

Evaluation of Telehealth Service for COVID-19 Outpatients: A Dashboard to Measure Healthcare Quality and Safety.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, changes and improvements regarding the organization have been made to adapt quickly at the Emergency Department (ED) of the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, Argentina. This article describes the design, implementation, and use of an electronic dashboard which provided monitoring of patients discharged home, during follow-up with telehealth. It was useful to access essential information to organize and coordinate professional work and patients' surveillance, providing highly relevant data in real-time as proxy variables for quality and safety during home isolation. The implemented tool innovated in the integration of technologies within a real context. The information management was crucial to optimize services and decision-making, as well to guarantee safety for healthcare workers and patients.