ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: COVID-19 has been a disruptive pandemic that has transformed the landscape of the health care system. The pandemic disproportionately affects patients from a racial diverse and economic depressed demographic, highly represented in Newark (Essex County, NJ). We seek to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the flow of patients to an inner-city health care system, specifically a major academic urology clinic in Newark, NJ. METHODS: We collected de-identified data for clinic volume and appointment no-show rates from the electronic medical record from September 16, 2019 to January 26, 2021. Publicly available data on COVID cases and death rates in Essex county was collected from public data reporting on March 4, 2020 to January 31, 2021. Data analysis and statistical analysis was performed with Jupyter Notebooks and Microsoft Excel. RESULTS: The number of patients who were no-shows was significantly correlated with daily COVID cases (-0.49, p=0.004). The total number of clinic patients was also less when there were higher COVID cases (-0.41, p=0.02). We found that the rate of no-shows and the daily reported COVID cases was weakly correlated (-0.33, p=0.06). The number of daily deaths from COVID-19 was not statistically correlated with clinic flow. Overall, we found that during the COVID pandemic our no-show rate averaged 25.4±0.093% compared to 25.9±0.065% prior to March 4, 2020. CONCLUSIONS: The total clinic volume and total number of no-show patients was significantly decreased on days with higher reported COVID-19 cases in Essex county. Reported COVID-19 deaths did not correlate with clinic flow. Future research is planned for looking at specific patient demographic data such as race/ ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and diagnosis. We will also evaluate whether the no show rate significantly delayed health care for these patients and affected their prognosis.