Complete Telehealth for Multidisciplinary Preoperative Workup Does Not Delay Time to Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery:...

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated implementation of telehealth throughout the US healthcare system. At our institution, we converted a fully integrated multidisciplinary bariatric clinic from face-to-face visits to entirely telehealth video/telephone visits. We hypothesized telehealth would increase the number of provider/patient encounters and therefore delay time to surgery.

This is a retrospective review of consecutive patients who underwent total telehealth preoperative workup. Demographics, comorbidities, and surgical characteristics were compared to the same number of consecutive patients who underwent a face-to-face approach 12 months prior, using a Wilcoxon test for continuous variables and chi-square or Fisher's exact test for categorical variables. Differences between time and surgery were compared using inverse probability of treatment-weighted estimates and number of preoperative visits using Poisson regression with distance to hospital as a confounder. Noninferiority margin for time to surgery was set to 60 days, and the number of visits was set to 2 visits.

Between March of 2020 and December of 2021, 36 patients had total telehealth workup, and were compared to 36 patients in the traditional group. Age, sex, body mass index, and comorbidities did not differ between groups. The average number of days to surgery was 121.1 days shorter in the telehealth group (90% bootstrap CI [- 160.4, - 81.8]). Estimated shift in the total number of visits was additional .76 visits in the traditional group (90% CI [.64, .91).

The total telehealth approach to preoperative bariatric multidisciplinary workup did not delay surgery and decreased number of total outpatient visits and time to surgery.