London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Virtual consultations, whereby consultations between GPs and hospital consultants are made possible by videoconferencing, are not cost-effective from the perspective of the NHS, but could provide a number of benefits to patients, according to a paper published in today's British Medical Journal.

The paper, Virtual outreach: economic evaluation of joint teleconsultations for patients referred by their general practitioner for a specialist opinion, reports on a six-month study whereby a videoconferencing link was set up at two hospitals and 29 general practices in the UK, to allow consultations between the GP, present with the patient in the practice, and a hospital consultant. A total of 1,051 patients were allocated virtual outreach consultations and 1,043 to standard outpatient consultations.

The virtual consultations were found to cost £724 per patient, compared to £625 for a conventional appointment, but patients taking part in teleconsultations incurred significantly lower transport costs and had to take less time off work than those in the comparison group.

Paul Jacklin, Research Fellow (Health Economics) in the Department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, one of the authors of the paper, comments: 'Considering total costs, we cannot justify the widespread adoption of virtual outreach on economic grounds. However, the relative cost-effectiveness could be improved by better patient selection. Furthermore, a six month follow up period may have been too short to detect all downstream savings, and improved patient satisfaction was not taken into account. We may therefore have underestimated the beneficial consequences of virtual outreach'.

Ends.

Contact: Paul Jacklin, +44 (0)20 7927 2069, paul.jacklin@lshtm.ac.uk