February 25, 2025

Insights into when kidney patients and care providers prefer virtual versus in-person visits

Interviews of kidney patients and care providers shed light on when virtual care visits may be preferred over in-person visits, and vice versa. Although opinions varied greatly on an individual basis, the results reveal some trends. 

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sudden shift in the delivery of non-dialysis kidney care, from a mixed approach of virtual and in-person care, to predominantly virtual care. To better understand the contexts under which virtual care works well, Dr. Micheli Bevilacqua and colleagues conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 kidney patients and/or caregivers and 12 health care providers, analyzing their feedback for key themes.  

The results show that, while patients generally enjoyed less travel time when engaging in virtual care, some of them missed human contact when they could not have in-person visits, and some felt overwhelmed with instructions for home-based video visits. Importantly, the results suggest that assumptions about preferences shouldn’t be made based on a person’s demographics. For example, some older people were comfortable with technology, and some patients residing in rural areas were content to travel for in-person visits. There was general agreement that the more medically complicated or urgent a situation was, the more likely an in-person visit would be preferable. The feedback also suggests that virtual care was more effective when patients and their care providers already had established relationships through previous in-person visits, whereas health care providers found it harder to build rapport and trust with new patients virtually. 

Taken as a whole, these results suggest that patient and provider preferences for virtual visits are highly individualized and should be considered on a case-by-case basis, the authors say.