CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When the pandemic hit last spring, doctors and dentist offices shut down, in part to preserve scarce masks and gloves. When they reopened, though, some Ohioans stayed away, not scheduling well visits or preventative care for fear of catching the coronavirus. Now that adults are getting vaccinated, are they rushing to their doctors’ offices?
A study by the Medical Group Management Association and Humana showed 97% of physician practices reported a drop in care volume by early April 2020. Safety was a primary concern for patients under the pandemic, causing nearly 87% of people to defer care. The study also revealed that 9% postponed care due to job or insurance loss, while 4% said it was due to elective surgery bans or noncompliance with mask requirements.
Melissa Wervey Arnold, chief executive officer for the Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, noted that after an initial drop in care volume last spring, she noticed an uptick in patients returning to visits.
Arnold pointed out that children are visiting the doctor more as restrictions loosen and schools start to reopen.
“We think as kids are going back to school, they are going back to their doctor,” Arnold said.
Dr. Nirav Vakharia, a primary care doctor with Cleveland Clinic, says public outreach created a significant uptick in patients coming in from deferred care. His primary care group went from reaching out to roughly 4,000 people through telephone, MyChart, or text to over 20,000 a week currently.
“We are really laser focused on trying to find these patients who have deferred their care and helping them understand what is okay to keep postponing versus what they might want to get on top of sooner rather than later,” Vakharia said.
He noted Cleveland Clinic’s primary care group outreach is focused on preventative and chronic disease care gaps. “That’s screenings for cancers, like breast cancer, colon cancer,” says Vakharia.” It’s about figuring out who is delaying care there so that we can help them get back on track.”
Vakharia says the outreach works as a form of preventative care, citing a slight uptick in patients dying at home due to heart attacks and strokes and finding cancers emerging in later stages, suggesting that postponing screening has caused doctors to miss these early stage cancers.
“I think it’s so important for us to focus on that we’re seeing the actual impact,” Vakharia says. “These later stage cancers, the excess deaths due to heart disease that we’ve started to see. This is what we’re going to notice over the next year or two, maybe three years as an effect of the pandemic.”
Dr. Shelly Sanders, a pediatrician at Senders Pediatrics in South Euclid, says the practice had a slight drop in care volume initially, but it leveled off after making necessary renovations and taking extra safety precautions for COVID, including making an acute care clinic patients suffering from COVID related issues and installing a new HVAC system.
“It’s because we have clean air and because we isolated all of our patients so that they were never able to come into the main area. So we saw a drop-off, but not as significant as I think some other places did,” Sanders said.
Senders saw a 30% drop off in care volume in March through May of 2020, but those patients have all but returned since.
Sanders says embracing telehealth and car visits helped maintain patient care volume.
“We did hundreds of car visits,” Sanders said. “The medical history was taken by HIPPA protected zoom, and then we would come into the car, briefly in PPE to do the physical examination.”
Dr. Erick Kauffman, chief medical officer and family physician at Neighborhood Family Practice said that after the pandemic hit last spring, the community health centers switched to digital visits. Since then, they have moved toward a hybrid approach with a mixture of face-to-face and virtual visits.
Kauffman says that since the COVID-19 vaccine has become more available, he has noticed an uptick in patients wanting to have in-person office visits.
“I think in the past month or so, and I think that relates to people getting the vaccine,” Kauffman said.
Kauffman says nearly 85% of the staff has been vaccinated already and ready to serve its patients who may have delayed or deferred necessary routine care. He noted many of the center’s patients have already been vaccinated as well.
“People are definitely feeling more comfortable with coming into the office to have a routine visit and get screenings done,” Kauffman said.
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March 24, 2021 at 07:00PM
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Primary care doctors’ visits increase as Ohioans are vaccinated against COVID - cleveland.com
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