Telemedicine Use Among People With HIV in 2021: The Hybrid-Care Environment

Telemedicine use for the care of people with HIV (PWH) significantly expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. During 2021, vaccine uptake increased and patients were encouraged to resume in-person care, resulting in a mixture of in-person and telemedicine visits. We studied how different patient populations used telemedicine in this hybrid-care environment.

Using observational data from patients enrolled in the Johns Hopkins HIV Clinical Cohort, we analyzed all in-person and telemedicine HIV primary care visits completed in an HIV clinic from January 1st, 2021, to December 31st, 2021. We used log-binomial regression to investigate the association between patient characteristics and the probability of completing a telemedicine versus in-person visit and the probability of completing a video versus telephone visit.

A total of 5518 visits were completed by 1884 patients; 4282 (77.6%) visits were in-person, 800 (14.5%) by phone, and 436 (7.9%) by video. The relative risk (RR) of completing telemedicine vs. in-person visits was 0.65 (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.47, 0.91) for patients age 65 years or older vs. age 20-39 years; 0.84 (95% CI: 0.72, 0.98) for male patients vs. female patients; 0.81 (95% CI: 0.66, 0.99) for Black vs. White patients; 0.62 (95% CI: 0.49, 0.79) for patients in the highest vs. lowest quartile of Area Deprivation Index; and 1.52 (95% CI: 1.26, 1.84) for patients >15 miles vs. <5 miles from clinic.

In the second year of the pandemic, overall in-person care was used more than telemedicine and significant differences persist across subgroups in telemedicine uptake.