Uthke, Lorraine D

E-consultations are being offered within clinic walls as an option for specialist advice without a face-to-face consultation appointment. In a six month time frame, nearly 100% of primary care internists and family medicine providers in a multispecialty practice had used an e-consultation at least once. Specialists also used e-consultations for advice from other specialists. E-consultations were often questions about interpreting images or laboratory tests, or questions about management of chronic conditions such as osteoporosis, hypertension, or headaches. Although e-consultations were offered as an alternative to face-to-face specialty consultations, 1,111 of 5,334 e-consultations eventually did receive face-to-face appointments in the same specialty. Within 30 days of the e-consultation 11.5% had a specialty face-to-face visit and 17.7% had seen a specialist face-to-face within 90 days of the e-consultation. The conversions of e-consultations to face-to-face consultations depended on the specialty providing the e-consultation (fewer for gastroenterology and infectious disease), patient distance from the clinic (fewer for international patients and those living greater than 800 kilometers from the clinic), and experience of specialist responding to the e-consultation (lower conversions for specialists providing 15 or more e-consultations).

An e-consultation is an asynchronous consultation performed by a specialist without a face-to-face patient visit. E-consultations have been available to primary care providers at the Mayo Clinic for several years. We reviewed e-consultations performed by specialists at the Mayo Clinic for the first six months of 2013. We included only “internal” e-consultations, originating from within the Rochester practice. During the study period a total of 3242 e-consultations were completed at the Mayo Clinic. After excluding those relating to patients who did not give research consent, 3008 e-consultations remained. We categorized our internal e-consultations into eight types. The most frequently used types were the first e-consultation processes to be implemented: the primary care to specialist e-consultation and the specialist to specialist e-consultation, accounting for 74% of the total. As these two types of e-consultation became widely used, the staff discovered that the e-consultation process could be adapted to meet specific practice needs and six more e-consultation types emerged. For example, intra-specialty e-consultations and surgical e-consultations accounted for 16% of the total. E-consultations appear to have improved access to specialists, and they are integrated into care processes when timely expert opinions are needed. As e-consultations evolve, it will be important to develop a standard, well-defined terminology to compare outcomes of these processes across practices.