Nikolaos Mouchtouris1, Giyarpuram Prashant1, James J Evans2. 1. Department of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. 2. Department of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Electronic address: James.Evans@Jefferson.edu.
We thank Kitov et al. for their letter, which highlights several important points. Access to care has been declining significantly over the past few decades, and this was significantly exacerbated by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We agree with the authors that telemedicine has improved access to specialized care. Federal and state laws regarding each component of telemedicine (live audiovisual communication, store-and-forward, remote patient monitoring, e-mail/phone) as well as adequate insurance coverage will be instrumental in improving access to care.Our group’s work
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has demonstrated high utilization of telemedicine across most divisions of neurosurgery for all types of patient visits during the pandemic. However, there have been significant fluctuations in the number of daily cases, severity of the COVID-19 variant, mandated restrictions, and vaccination rates across the United States and around the world, all of which can impact the need for telemedicine. We look forward to evaluating telemedicine utilization rates as well as patient and physician satisfaction in the next 3–5 years to determine its long-term potential.