Patient satisfaction with telehealth versus in‐person visits during COVID‐19 at a large, public healthcare system

RATIONALE: During the coronavirus disease pandemic, audio-only and video telehealth visits became more widely available, but the relative patient satisfaction between telehealth and in-person modalities is not well-described. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: Our objective was to compare patient satisfaction with audio-only, video, and in-person adult primary care visits at a large, urban public healthcare system. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, we used aggregated data from Press Ganey patient satisfaction surveys at 17 primary care facilities at New York City Health + Hospitals for visits between 1 June 2021 to 30 November 2021. We compared mean scores for questions common to surveys for each modality in domains of Access, Care Provider, and Overall Assessment using pairwise comparisons with two-tailed t-tests. RESULTS: There were 7,183/79,562 (9.0%) respondents for in-person visits and 1,009/15,092 (6.7%) respondents for telehealth visits. Compared to respondents for in-person visits, respondents for telehealth visits were more likely to be aged 35-64 years, Asian, and speak English as their primary language, and less likely to be ≥65 years old, Black or other race, and speak Spanish or another language as their primary language (p < 0.001). Patients reported higher mean satisfaction for Access measures for telehealth visits than in-person visits (p < 0.001). For Care Provider satisfaction questions, video visits generally had higher mean scores than in-person and, in turn, audio-only visits. For Overall Assessment questions, video visits had higher mean scores than in-person and, subsequently, audio-only visits. CONCLUSION: Of the visit modalities, video visits had the highest mean satisfaction scores across all domains. Telehealth may improve experiences with access, but audio-only visits may provide poorer visit experiences.