Confronting hidden COVID-19 burden: a telemedical solution for elective urological outpatient clinics
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BRIEF REPORT
Confronting hidden COVID‑19 burden: a telemedical solution for elective urological outpatient clinics Thilo Westhofen1 · Giuseppe Magistro1 · Simon Lennartz2,3 · Jozefina Casuscelli1 · Christian Stief1 · Severin Rodler1 Received: 1 May 2020 / Accepted: 19 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Maintaining high-quality care for urological patients is a challenge during and after the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19) pandemic. We observe an increasing volume of postponed elective visits at our tertiary care hospital, holding the risk for deterioration of non-emergency disease conditions. As it is unclear for how long the pandemic will last, we propose to implement telehealth as a solution to provide regular symptom monitoring compatible with social distancing guidelines during the pandemic and beyond. Telemedical assessment and prioritizing of high-risk patients for individual consults at outpatient services will have to be aligned with available outpatient capacity and local outbreak severity. Keywords COVID-19 · Telehealth · Patient management · Elective patients
Background Initially discovered in Wuhan, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [1] has rapidly spread around the world and hence has been declared a pandemic by the world health organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020 [2]. As the outbreak forced health care systems to reallocate medical resources to provide capacities for the overwhelming surge of COVID-19 patients, the majority of elective urological outpatient procedures at our hospital have been suspended and postponed. With more than 155,000 confirmed cases and more than 6000 reported deaths in Germany as of April 29, 2020 [3] the current efforts are mostly directed towards managing Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s15010-020-01511-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Thilo Westhofen [email protected]‑muenchen.de 1
Department of Urology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Marchioninistrasse 15, 81377 Munich, Germany
2
Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Cologne, Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
3
Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 55 Fruit St, White 270, Boston, MA 02114, USA
the acute situation and developing curative treatments [4] or vaccinations [5]. Yet, adapting and maintaining outpatient care is another arising challenge [6]. As the majority of urological private practices shut down during the first COVID19 surge, the burden of postponed elective treatments on our healthcare systems dramatically grows. Moreover, as prolonged or intermittent social distancing might be necessary until as late as 2022 [7], solutions for outpatient care should be suitable for long-term implementation, if required. As a large tertiary referral center, we sought to establish a strategy to overcome the anticipated increase in pa
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