Telemedicine use and decrements to type 2 diabetes and hypertension care during the COVID-19 pandemic

BMC Digital Health

Table 2 Unadjusted differences in telemedicine use and outcome measures, by pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 pandemic study periods

	Overall	Pre-COVID-19 study period	COVID-19 study period	T-test Difference
Patient n	642,224	308,589	333,635
HbA1c testing (%)	64.6	66.9	62.4	-0.04***
Patient n^a	414,761	206,424	208,337
HbA1c % (mean, SD)	7.19 (1.48)	7.18 (1.47)	7.21 (1.50)	0.03***
HbA1c control^b (%)	78.4	78.7	78.2	-0.005***
Patient n^c	1,963,563	946,209	1,017,354
Blood pressure testing (%)	77.4	80.9	74.1	-0.07***
Patient n^d	1,519,234	765,181	754,053
Blood pressure control^d (%)	74.7	75.3	74.2	-0.011***
Total telemedicine encounters per patient (mean, SD)	0.29 (0.88)	0.00 (0.07)	0.56 (1.16)	0.56***
Total in-person encounters per patient (mean, SD)	2.85 (3.19)	3.31 (3.47)	2.42 (2.83)	-0.89***

N/S Not statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level, SD Standard deviation
^***, **, and * indicate p < 0.001, p < 0.01, and p < 0.05, respectively
^aIncludes adults with type 2 diabetes and HbA1c testing
^bHbA1c is considered under control if the patient’s HbA1c test result is less than 8.0%
^cIncludes adults with type 2 diabetes and/or hypertension
^dBlood pressure is considered under control if the patient’s last recorded systolic and diastolic blood pressure values are below 140 mmHg and 90 mmHg, respectively

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