Teledermatology Before, During, and After Covid-19: A Vital Tool to Improve Access and Equity in Specialty Care

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented strains on our medical system as specialties have had to reconsider “essential” in-person services and find novel ways to remotely ensure continuity of care. One such modality of care includes telehealth services, which have experienced a rapid rise in utility with a reported 4,347% increase in telehealth visits from March 2019 to March 2020 [1]. Although used for decades, telemedicine has historically been limited by reimbursement, as well as systems adoption and maintenance costs. Physical distancing measures throughout the pandemic, however, necessitated essentially overnight adoption of insurance coverage in both public and private sectors. Dermatology is among the earliest and most well-suited specialties to adopt telemedicine given the visual nature of the specialty [2]. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen a radical uptake of teledermatology services across the nation. In this paper, we review the literature published to date highlighting the state of teledermatology prior to the pandemic, the policy changes that facilitated the rapid expansion of teledermatology services during the pandemic, and the impact this has had on our dermatologic practices now and moving forward.