Patient attitudes about specialty follow-up care by telephone

摘要

The number of specialty care visits in the United States is rising, contributing to in-creased costs and delayed access to specialty care. In primary care, telephone-based follow-up has decreased the number of outpatient visits. However, telephone-based follow-up in specialty care has focused on clinical outcomes and quality of life, not on reduction of outpatient healthcare utilization.Little is known about patient attitudes toward using telephone-based programs to reduce office visits in US medical specialty clinics. In the context of a clinical operations project aimed at reducing discretionary specialty follow-up visits, we explored patient attitudes about telephone-based follow-up.