Telemedicine (virtual clinic) effectively delivers the required healthcare service for pediatric ambulatory surgical patients during the current era of COVID-19 pandemic: A mixed descriptive study

•COVID-19 pandemic had exerted a greatly unprecedented impact on the whole healthcare sector, including pediatric ambulatory surgery.•Obtaining a near and suitable outpatient department (OPD) clinic appointment became a big problem.•Telemedicine (virtual clinic) can provide a suitable smooth healthcare service in response to challenging settings of the COVID-19 associated regulatory precautions.•It achieved a high attendance rate and an overall outstanding patient /parent satisfaction.•No show, cancelation, and unexpected re-admission rates can be significantly diminished by this valuable digital health technology. Children often suffer from congenital or acquired diseases. Ambulatory cases represent the vast majority of pediatric surgical cases. COVID-19 pandemic-associated regulatory precautions had made the process of seeking medical advice at a suitable appointment such a big problem. We utilized telemedicine (online encounter) to deliver the required healthcare service for sorting and guiding pediatric ambulatory surgical patients. In this article, we aimed to: (1) present our experience, (2) evaluate the effectiveness, and (3) document the results of this technology to solve the problem of difficult healthcare accessibility. In this study, we compared the utilization of telemedicine (virtual clinic via video consultation) prospectively in the current era of the COVID-19 pandemic in the period from June 2020 to July 2021 to the in-person clinic encounter at the outpatient department (OPD) retrospectively in the previous year (from June 2019 until the end of May 2020) for perioperative management of pediatric ambulatory surgical patients. The study was conducted at 3 tertiary care pediatric surgery centers. The information recorded for analysis included: demographic data, surgical condition distribution, time interval from the appointment request till the actual encounter with the surgeon, conversation duration, distance traveled, and ultimate fate of the consultations. For both groups, service was evaluated after the first follow-up visit by a patient survey questionnaire (Patient Experience Assessment form) including questions relevant to each encounter. A total of 1124 pediatric patients with various ambulatory surgical conditions had been scheduled for virtual clinic video encounters. Of them, 1056 cases were evaluated by video consultation, supervised by their parents or caregivers, thus, achieving an attendance rate of 94%. Of the remaining cases