Research pick: Virtual visits: the doctor will screen you now - "Optimising patient revisit intervals for virtual and office appointments in chronic care"

In the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and in preparation for future crises, there is a need to improve the way in which medical appointments are scheduled and which ones can readily be carried out online rather than in the doctor’s office. Work in the International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, suggests that virtual appointments can be a viable alternative to face-to-face consultations in many instances. This is particularly the case when a follow-up consultation is required that does not require a physical examination, samples, tests, or scans.

Xiao Yu and Armagan Bayram of the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at the University of Michigan at Dearborn in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, explain how virtual healthcare appointments can be a cost-effective alternative to the conventional visit and patients can receive essential care remotely. This offers benefits to both provider and patient in terms of time and effort consumed as well as reducing the risk of acquired infections.

The team points out that scheduling virtual appointments within a busy schedule of face-face appointments and ensuring that healthcare providers and patients are truly benefiting from the online experience is difficult. The team has developed an open migration network to simulate the flow of patients through a clinic. They have then used this to model mathematically the optimal follow-up rates, the revisit intervals, in other words, for both virtual and office appointments. With such a model in hand, the team suggests that managers in a healthcare provision setting should be able to make decisions in a more systematic manner in terms of how frequently patients in long-term, chronic, healthcare situations need to be seen in the flesh, as it were, or virtually.

Approximately half of the population of the USA lives with a chronic disease and similar figures are seen elsewhere in the developed world. As such, effective disease management can improve the quality of life for millions of people as well as allowing them to minimise symptoms or the very least cope better with their condition. Virtual appointments can be integrated into such management, reducing the number of trips to the doctor’s office a patient needs to take, thus saving them inconvenience, anxiety, and costs. Virtual appointments might also reduce the risk of incident or accident or indeed the risk of a patient acquiring a troublesome infection from a third party en route to and from and at the doctor’s office, a point that remains significant in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Yu, X. and Bayram, A. (2023) ‘Optimising patient revisit intervals for virtual and office appointments in chronic care’, Int. J. Industrial and Systems Engineering, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp.363–383.