Digital infrastructure and uptake of remote appointments in primary care in England: an empirical analysis
The Unsolved Problem:
How can we think about addressing the ongoing reduction in the total number of GP practices, staff workload which is a contributing factor to demanding work environments to meet patient needs?
Abstract:
This study looks at the patterns in the use of remote appointments before and after the arrival of Covid-19. The paper has two objectives. First, to investigate the spread of broadband and mobile usage across England before and after the arrival of Covid-19 England. Second, to empirically estimate the impact of the use of broadband and mobile usage on the likelihood of remote appointments in primary care in England and the impact on patient satisfaction. We use publicly available data using five waves of the GP Patient Survey in England (2018 to 2022). We link the five waves of data on GP practices to five waves of publicly available data on internet activity from the UK telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, using two measures: broadband strength and mobile usage
About the speaker:
Dr Divya Srivastava is a health economist with expertise in health financing, digital health technologies and comparative health policy. Her work has been published in various journals including Social Science and Medicine, BMJ Global Health, BMC Public Health and Applied Economics.
She has worked for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), where she led projects on provider payment reform and geographic variations in health care to understand health system performance, the WHO European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, and for national institutions (Canada, UK). She has provided consultancy advice to international organisations (UNAIDS), national governments (Finland, UK, Australia), and to the private sector. Divya holds a BSc Statistics Honours (University of Manitoba, Canada), MA Economics (McMaster University, Canada), MSc IHP (Brian Abel-Smith Award for Best Dissertation) and a PhD (Merck Scholar) from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
About Unsolved Problems:
This series of seminars forms part of the DSI Squared collaboration between the LSE Data Science Institute and ICL Data Science Institute, to foster innovations by bridging the social sciences and computer science and STEM subjects. Researchers from both Institutes are invited to showcase their ideas in front of an expert audience of colleagues from both LSE and Imperial. These attendees offer their ranging expertise and knowledge to crowd source solutions to these stumbling blocks! At these lunchtime meetings, a light lunch is provided after the seminar.