Online Outpatient Services During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, many people felt anxiety and panic, which led to an increase in visits to outpatient clinics. To relieve the pressure on these clinics, a new medical service, the Online Outpatient, was introduced. Starting in late January, 2020, by February 29, there had been more than 5500 online consultations, with 95.2% of these having been satisfactorily completed. To analyze the important role and success of the Online Outpatient, consultation data extracted for 4102 valid cases from the Online Outpatient system at the Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital were analyzed using statistical methods, such as chi-square tests, the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel Test, and non-parametric tests. It was found that 83.62% had been advised to stay at home, which reduced the number of people going to the hospital, and relieved the pressure on the outpatient departments. While around 44% or 1806 of the online outpatients had claimed to be suffering from anxiety, 80.34% of these admitted feeling relief from their anxiety after consulting. Therefore, the online outpatient medical consultation service was successful in both alleviating client anxiety and panic and relieving the pressure on offline outpatient departments. This new type of medical service could assist in managing hospital outpatients during public health emergencies. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.