Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on consultations and diagnosis in ENT practices in Germany

Abstract

During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a significant reduction in the frequency of visits to healthcare institutions. This circumstance influenced the timely diagnosis and subsequential initiation of therapy in almost all specialties. The aim of the present study is to evaluate a hypothetical change in health awareness with regard to outpatient consultations of ENT physicians in Germany. This study used anonymized data from 146 ENT practices in Germany and included 162,724 patients in Q2 2019, 158,077 in Q3 2019, 128,342 in Q2 2020, and 149,153 in Q3 2020. The first outcome was the difference in the number of patients with at least one visit to these practices between the second and third quarters of 2019 and the second and third quarters of 2020. The second outcome was the number of patients with new diagnoses per practice, defined as diagnoses not previously documented in the database for a given patient. The number of patients per practice was significantly lower in Q2 2020 compared to Q2 2019 (879 versus 1108, p<0.001). There were no significant differences when comparing Q3 2020 to Q3 2019 (1022 versus 1083, p=0.261). Diagnoses of otitis media (-43%), acute upper respiratory tract infections (-42%), chronic upper respiratory tract diseases: (-21%), hearing loss (-20%) decreased significantly in Q2 2020 compared to Q2 2019. There was still a significant decrease in patient numbers for acute upper respiratory tract infections (-26%) and otitis media (-25%) in Q3 2020 compared to Q3 2019. The presented results are attributable to several facts. Avoidance of doctor´s visits by the patients, reduction of allocation of appointments by practices and consistent obeying of distance and hygiene measures in terms of wearing filtering face masks (e.g. FFP2/KN95).