Impact of telehealth in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020

Telehealth is allowing healthcare workers to see patients virtually in locations that were not accessible previously, and this has reduced cost and time as well as saved lives. Bangladesh is a developing country with only 6 doctors for every 10,000 patients. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a rising percentage of individuals in Bangladesh are turning to telehealth as it may provide more convenience and access to care for online consultations while minimizing the risks of virus transmission that may result from going to a healthcare provider. Our research question was to see if there was any impact of telehealth utilization on patient satisfaction during the pandemic in 2020. This study will leverage a timely national experiment to evaluate the users of telehealth across the Bangladeshi population. We obtained de-identified data for 200 patients among outpatient telehealth visits from Global Health Data Exchange as it captures telehealth use throughout Bangladesh. The analysis showed that 92% of participants were males in the study population, and had a higher dependency on telehealth than 8% of the females. We found that the youngest age group, had the highest dependence on telehealth, compared to any other age group in Bangladesh. The lowest dependence was among the oldest age group of 45 years and above. There was strong association between patient satisfaction and telehealth use.