Postoperative telephone clinic can offer similar benefits to in-person care

Taking time to drive to the doctor’s office, wait for the doctor, go through the appointment and drive home—that's a lot to ask after having surgery. Telephone postoperative clinics at Veterans Affairs facilities aim to ease this burden.

A checkup after minor surgery can easily be done via telehealth and provide the same level of care as an in-office visit. In a study that compared pre- and postoperative visits using telephone care, results found that a call is just as effective as an office visit. The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

In a study of 200 patients, 29 pre-interventions and 171 post-interventions, use of in-person clinics decreased from 0.83 visits per eligible patient to 0.4 after the implementation of the telehealth clinic. Nearly 90 percent of patients who completed telephone consultations were discharged and 11 percent were escalated to a repeat phone call or a clinic visit.

"We are pleased with the results of this intervention, which has increased access to care while mitigating long travel distances and inconvenience for many of our patients," said lead author Kristy Kummerow Broman, MD, MPH, a general surgery resident at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.