Mental Health Virtual Visits Surge During Pandemic
Expanded access to telemedicine visits helped to meet the surging need for mental health care during the coronavirus pandemic, a study of more than 100 million outpatient visits in the United States suggests.For the study, researchers compared trends in outpatient mental health care before the pandemic — from 2016 to 2018 — to what happened in 2020 when stay-at-home orders limited access to care. The number of in-person visits declined 22 percent in March 2020 compared with the same period in pre-pandemic years, followed by plunges of 50 percent in April and 56 percent in May.But starting in April 2020, the total volume of mental health care visits exceeded pre-pandemic levels, driven by gains in telemedicine appointments that more than made up for the loss of in-person encounters, researchers reported…