Utilization of Telemedicine Services in an Academic Chronic Pain Practice Following the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Retrospective Study

Background The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated telemedicine implementation across health care, including specialties that depend on longitudinal follow-up such as chronic pain medicine. The utilization and timing of telemedicine adoption within individual academic pain practices remain incompletely characterized and studied. Objective To describe annual utilization of synchronous video visits in an academic chronic pain practice from 2020 through 2023 and to identify operational factors that affect interpretation of longitudinal encounter growth. Methods We conducted a single-center retrospective descriptive study of video visits documented in the Epic electronic health record video-visit encounter tabs for physicians in the UTHealth Houston chronic pain practice. Complete calendar years from January 1, 2020, through December 31, 2023, were analyzed. Annual counts, absolute changes, and percentage changes were summarized descriptively. Physician staffing changes were recorded as an important contextual variable. The study was approved by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Institutional Review Board (HSC-MS-24-0814). Results Recorded video encounters increased from 0 in 2020 to 35 in 2021, 59 in 2022, and 584 in 2023. Among 678 encounters recorded across the study period, 86.1% occurred in 2023. Utilization increased by 68.6% from 2021 to 2022 and by 889.8% from 2022 to 2023; the 2023 count was 16.7-fold higher than the 2021 count. During the study period, the practice expanded from two part-time pain physicians to two full-time and three part-time pain physicians, and two additional part-time physicians joined and subsequently departed. Conclusions Recorded telemedicine utilization expanded markedly within this academic chronic pain practice, particularly in 2023, supporting sustained operational acceptance after the initial pandemic period. However, the absence of total-visit denominators and major concurrent workforce expansion prevent attribution of the observed increase solely to telemedicine adoption. Future studies should evaluate telemedicine as a proportion of total visits and examine patient access and satisfaction.