Virtual clinics during the COVID-19 outbreak

Virtual clinics during the COVID-19 outbreak
Zohreh Javanmard,¹ Marjan Ghazisaeedi,² Marzieh Esmaeili,^3,*
1. Department of Health Information Technology, Ferdows school of Paramedical and Health, Birjand University of Medical Sciences, Birjand, Iran
2. Department of Health Information Management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
3. Department of Health Information Management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Introduction: During the COVID-19 outbreak, the provision of health services has faced challenges; face-to-face communication leads to increase the transmission of the disease, so many healthcare centers have provided only essential services. Virtual clinics could provide health care services for diagnostic, therapeutic, monitoring and consulting purposes through information and communication technologies. The significant results are reducing the transmission of coronavirus disease, workload, and costs. In addition, virtual clinics could improve the quality of services at any time and place in such circumstances. Therefore, this study aims to review developed virtual clinics during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Methods: In this review, a comprehensive search was done in September 2020 through PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar with the keywords of “SARS-CoV-2” and “Virtual clinic” alongside their synonyms in the titles and abstracts of the papers. At first duplicated and non-English papers were left out; then, the studies which were related to developing or evaluating of virtual clinics during COVD-19 outbreak were selected to extract information.
Results: The search resulted in 365 papers, among which 23 papers providing virtual clinics that designed during COVID-19 outbreak. They are developed in USA (10), UK (9), Canada (3), and Saudi Arabia (1). The virtual clinics provided health services in order to counseling and monitoring of patients with COVID-19 (3), cancer (2), diabetes (1), fractures and trauma (2), immunodeficiency (1), kidney stones (1), and also providing specialties such as maxillofacial surgery (2), men's health (1), dentistry (1), psychology and mental health (2), optometry (1), pediatrics (2), orthopedics (2), ENT (1), and Gastroenterology (1). Online visits were done through phone (17%), video conference (13%), or combination of them (61%). Moreover, patients and healthcare workers could communicate with each other through designed software, patient portals, e-mail, WhatsApp, and mobile applications. Some studies had addressed the challenges, flowcharts, and guidelines associated with implementing and running a virtual clinic.
Conclusion: Although the provision of health care is inevitable, it is also crucial to prevent unnecessary face-to-face visits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, using technologies to provide tele-health services could be a beneficial approach. The studies have shown that virtual clinics could facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients in such circumstances and prevent unnecessary referrals to health centers. It also leads to improving the quality of care services and user satisfaction. Therefore, providing guidelines, frameworks, and software and hardware requirements for the design and implementation of virtual clinics could be a priority for managers and decision makers.
Keywords: COVID-19, Pandemic, Telemedicine, Virtual clinic, Virtual visit