Patient satisfaction with cancer care delivery through telemedicine at a comprehensive cancer center across three years during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

• Published in: Journal of clinical oncology Vol. 42; no. 16_suppl; p. 1632
• Main Authors: Doshi, Sahil D, Khadem Charvadeh, Yasin, Seier, Kenneth, Bange, Erin Mary, Daly, Robert Michael, Polubriaginof, Fernanda C. G., Buckley, Michael T., Kuperman, Gilad, Stetson, Peter D., Schrag, Deb, Morris, Michael J., Panageas, Katherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.06.2024
• ISSN: 0732-183X; 1527-7755
• DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.1632

1632 Background: Telemedicine, once sparingly utilized, surged during the COVID-19 pandemic to enhance care accessibility and safety concerns. Despite initial satisfaction, its usage remains highly variable across institutions. We sought to explore patient satisfaction at a comprehensive cancer center, associations with demographic characteristics, and change over time. Methods: A survey was sent to all first-time telemedicine users at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center from September 2021 to October 2023. Adult patients who had their initial telemedicine visit, regardless of specialty, received the questionnaire. It comprised 10 general questions about the telemedicine experience and 11 questions regarding clinical trial education and informed consent. To analyze the unstructured free text responses, we employed BERTopic, a topic modeling algorithm that leverages transformer-based embeddings to facilitate the creation of easily interpretable topics within a collection of text documents. Through topic modeling with BERT embeddings, we captured subtle nuances and semantic relationships in language to identify topics more effectively. Results: A total of 15,111 patients completed 15,251 questionnaires; 140 patients completing two surveys. Patient demographics are summarized in Table 1; the median age at encounter was 66 years and 98% of patients preferred English. Satisfaction levels were high, with 92% expressing willingness for future telemedicine visits and 90% recommending it to other patients. Notably, 21% found telemedicine superior to in-person visits, while 53% considered them equal. Further, satisfaction remained consistent across six-month intervals from 2021-2023. In 1606 (11%) surveys, patients noted discussing clinical trials; 17% preferred in-person discussions for the informed consent process while most either preferred telemedicine or had no preference. Topic modeling revealed 18 topics within the unstructured dataset; key topics included comments on video & audio quality, connectivity and technology issues, convenience for patients who live outside of the city and those with physical limitations, and long wait time to see a doctor. Conclusions: Our analysis confirms high patient satisfaction with telemedicine, including discussions on clinical trial enrollment, that has remained consistent in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. Given variability in use, it is important to identify how to better deliver telemedicine to those patients who prefer it.[Table: see text]