JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

eConsulta (asynchronous and two-way teleconsultation in Primary Care) is one of the most important telemedicine developments in the Catalan public health system, a service that has been heavily boosted by the outbreak of the pandemic. It is vitally important to know the characteristics of its users in order to be able to meet their needs and have an idea of who is being covered (and who is not) through this service in a context where there is less accessibility to the health system.

Objective:

Undertake a descriptive analysis of the profile of the citizens who use the tool and the type of use they make of it to gain an understanding of the elements that characterize their decision to use it, making a distinction between those who used it before and those who have used it since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

Methods:

Descriptive observational study based on administrative data. The study differentiates between the pre and during COVID periods, taking as the cut-off point the day the state of emergency was declared in Spain (13 March 2020), and between users who send messages and those who only receive them. The main study variable is the use of the eConsulta service.

Results:

The pandemic has resulted in almost triple the number of unique users in just the first three months observed (220,043/76,598, 2.87). Since the start of the COVID outbreak, although users have continued to be predominantly female, they are systematically younger than before, more actively employed and with less complex pathologies for the two user profiles analysed. There is also a relative decrease in the number of conversations initiated by higher-income urban citizens and an increase in users in rural areas.

Conclusions:

This study identifies a change in the profile of citizens who use the eConsulta tool, which as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic now has a profile similar to that of the average citizen: actively employed, with low complexity of pathology and who receives more messages proactively from the health professionals through eConsulta. The pandemic has helped to generalize the use of telemedicine as a tool to compensate to some extent for the decline in face-to-face visits, especially in younger citizen profiles.