Telehealth Use in Ophthalmology Modest During COVID-19 Pandemic

According to recent findings from a quality improvement research, telehealth utilisation grew over the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic before levelling, with the lowest rate of use seen in ophthalmology. The study made the case that teleophthalmic visits and asynchronous testing could be combined to increase access to teleophthalmic subspecialty care, but it also noted that more research might be required to determine whether asynchronous testing outside of a single institution could be a successful and long-lasting strategy. Author of the study Tyson N. Kim, MD, PhD, Department of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco, stated that these trends during the COVID-19 pandemic "validated intrinsic barriers to ophthalmic telehealth while also providing opportunities to evaluate feasibility of alternate ophthalmic telehealth care paradigms."