Abstract
Purpose :
Across all medical and surgical specialties, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive and likely lasting impact on the practice patterns of providers and the behaviors of patients. In ophthalmology, many new technologies, protocols, and recommendations have emerged, including altered triaging patterns and resource allocation. To provide addition data to such quality improvement efforts, this retrospective study examines one year’s worth of data on the volume and nature of emergent ophthalmic consultations at one of the largest and busiest hospitals in one of the largest counties in the United States.
Methods :
The timing and nature of every new, daily consultation to the ophthalmology service placed from the emergency department at a large tertiary hospital in Los Angeles County was recorded from July 2020 until June 2021. Of note, this data did not include inpatient consultations, outpatient referrals made by other providers, or consults made from the urgent care clinic. Additional data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were obtained from resources publicly available online.
Results :
During the study period, the ophthalmology service received 4,149 new consults from the emergency department, approximately 12 new consultations daily on average. Interestingly, we found that this volume dropped from October 2020 through February 2021 (down to 8 daily consults in January), coinciding with a peak of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths reported in Los Angeles County over the same timeframe. Further analysis into the consult reason and the urgency of the consults was also performed.
Conclusions :
This study utilizes a large ophthalmic data set obtained through the most severe COVID-19 surge in the United States to date. We identified a decrease in consultation volume during a COVID-19 surge and characterized changes in the nature of these emergent ophthalmic referrals during this time.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.