The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a shift to the use of telehealth visits, opening a new frontier in healthcare delivery and an opportunity for PCORnet® data resources to assist researchers in studying the effectiveness of this rapidly evolving method of healthcare delivery.

Many patients, including those managing chronic diseases and those in underserved populations, including people who live in rural areas, adopted telehealth visits during the pandemic, transforming them from once-rare occurrences to the norm. The PCORnet infrastructure now includes data from these virtual encounters, supporting patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) on telehealth.

A new report on the most recent network query of PCORnet data resources helps investigators identify populations well suited for such research.  Titled “Characterizing Telehealth Visits Across Clinical Research Networks Participating in PCORnet®, The National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network,” the query explored data from January 2019 to September 2022 about patients’ ages, chronic conditions and comorbidities,  socioeconomic status, geographic location as well as the locales and monthly count of telehealth encounters.

Telehealth topics covered include trends in use, disparities in delivery before and during the pandemic,  and how patients use the delivery method to manage chronic conditions in underserved populations.

Network queries like this involve hundreds of healthcare sites and data from more than 30 million patient electronic health records (EHRs). The scope of information available can help clinicians and researchers understand how the PCORnet infrastructure can support future studies on a range of healthcare services, conditions, populations, and more.

Another recent public query of PCORnet data resources, titled “Cohort of Patients with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Across Clinical Research Networks Participating in PCORnet®, The National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network,” looked at healthcare use by people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) at PCORnet® Network Partners. This query, the largest known, national-scale descriptive analysis of IDD populations using EHR data, demonstrates how the PCORnet data infrastructure can be used to support national-scale research  for IDD patients.

Check out these reports in the Resource section and learn how PCORnet data resources can power CER studies on a range of topics.