Published on
Updated
Reading 1 min.
Patients who “teleconsult” general practitioners are on average more urban and younger than the people seen in their offices, according to a study published Thursday by Drees, the statistical department of health and social ministries.
Remote consultation is not yet the remedy for the “medical deserts” of the countryside. It is indeed for doctors established in the most urbanized territories that the practice has developed most strongly.
“In Ile-de-France, 7.8% of the activity of liberal general practitioners corresponds to remote consultations in 2021 (12% in Paris and 7.2% in the suburbs of the urban center of Paris), against 2, 2% in rural areas excluding overseas territories“, specifies the Drees.
Teleconsultations are also more often carried out with young patients, regardless of the territory of residence: in 2021, 45.2% were with people aged 15 to 44, compared to 28.7% of in-office consultations .
Another lesson: teleconsultations do not seem to be aimed primarily at abolishing distances, since for 58.6% of them the doctor practices in the municipality of residence of the patient or less than 5 kilometers away.
Unsurprisingly, the study generally confirms the sharp increase in teleconsultations under the effect of the Covid-19 crisis. Liberal GPs carried out 13.5 million in 2020, then 9.4 million in 2021, when there were only 80,000 in 2019. The practice is taking hold over time, but remains infrequent: it represented 3.7% of liberal general medicine activity in 2021. Less than home visits.