Descriptive Analysis of Patients Receiving Outpatient eConsults for Neurological Disorders in the United States

Abstract

Introduction:

Interprofessional consultations (“eConsults”), which facilitate asynchronous specialist consultations, remain understudied in neurological disorders. We aimed to describe the patient population receiving eConsult services for neurological disorders nationwide and to conduct a comparative analysis between rural and urban patients within this eConsult cohort.

Methods:

We analyzed a dataset of U.S. outpatient claims from employer-sponsored commercial and Medicare plans. Using standardized mean differences, we compared clinical and sociodemographic patient characteristics between urban and rural patients within the eConsult group.

Results:

We identified 1,374 patients who had an eConsult order for a neurological disorder. Overall eConsult volume increased by 548.5% between 2019 and 2021. A majority of the cohort were aged 65 years or older (23.7%), had an eConsult order in 2021 (52.4%), and live in an urban area (90.4%). The primary diagnosis for our cohort was likely to be a sleep-wake disorder (21.9%), cerebrovascular disease (14.3%), neurological sign or symptom (14.2%), or headache (13.7%). In the secondary analysis, rural eConsult patients exhibited higher rates of primary diagnoses for traumatic brain injury, neuroophthalmic disorders, or neuropathy than their urban counterparts.

Discussion:

In this national sample of commercially insured patients, the utilization of eConsults for neurological conditions increased nationwide since 2019, especially for patients living in rural areas.