Telehealth could be a viable long-term option for people living with HIV (PLHIV), potentially saving them time, effort and expense related to in-person medical visits.
This is according to a study – “Assessing the Disruption of Health Services During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Adults Living With HIV by Age in Essex County, NJ: A Cross-Sectional Study” by Kristen Krause, Anita G. Karr, Juhi Aggarwal, et al – that appeared in the Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care.
“For folks who see their doctors several times a year and don’t need to give biosamples at every visit, telehealth visits can improve quality of life while maintaining medical efficacy,” said Krause, the study’s first author. “There are a lot of upsides to telehealth, assuming it works as well as in-person visits. It saves patients’ time. It reduces cars on the road. If patients are sick, it keeps them home and slows disease transmission.”
In this study, the researchers interviewed 133 patients living with HIV in Essex County, New Jersey, about their pandemic-era health experiences between October 2020 and June 2021.
Some of the key findings included:
- Telehealth didn’t appear to hinder patients’ HIV treatment, with 98.5% percent of participants able to see or speak with an HIV healthcare provider during the pandemic. About 9.4% reported having trouble obtaining their antiretroviral therapy (ART) medication after March 4, 2020, when COVID-19 restrictions began in New Jersey.
- 69.2% of participants accessed their healthcare providers via telehealth during the pandemic. Of those who used telehealth, 65.3% reported being “very happy” or “happy” with how it met their medical care needs, and 92.4% rated the overall quality of telehealth care as “excellent,” “very good,” or “good.
- Most patients also maintained their health outcomes – i.e. 65.7% had an undetectable viral load, indicating well-managed HIV, and 86.9% had a CD4 count of 200 cells per cubic millimeter of blood or higher, suggesting a healthy immune system.
“For those people who were already engaged in care, the pandemic didn’t totally disrupt things for them, and they really didn’t have a lot of negative health-related outcomes,” Krause said.
Concerns arose at the pandemic’s outset about the potential impact on HIV care. Many infectious disease providers were redeployed to focus on COVID-19, raising worries about disruptions to HIV treatment. However, Krause said those fears proved unfounded for patients already engaged in care.
The researchers also looked for differences in outcomes between older (55 years and above) and younger HIV patients. Contrary to their hypothesis, they found no significant differences between the age groups in adapting to telehealth or maintaining their health outcomes.
“While we hypothesized that older participants may have faced more obstacles and potentially have worse health outcomes due to COVID-19-related care disruptions, we did not see any such differences between those older and younger than 55 years of age,” Krause said.
