PhD Scientific Days 2022

Clinical Medicine VI. (Poster discussion will take place on the terrace of the room during the Coffee Break)

Emergency Use and Efficacy of Teledermatology as a Novel Tool for Early Detection of Skin Cancer during the First Wave of The COVID-19 Pandemic

Text of the abstract

Introduction: After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of telemedicine spread across different medical disciplines at an unprecedented level, including dermatology as well. The implementation of teledermatology enabled the continuous provision of skin cancer screening even during pandemic restrictions at the Semmelweis University.

Aims: The main goal of our study was to determine the efficacy of teledermatology patient care for early detection of skin cancers at the Department of Dermatology, Venereology and Dermatooncology, Semmelweis University during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: Patients were able to submit skin lesions via a mobile phone application (MedInnoScan Ltd.). In our retrospective study, diagnosis of lesions obtained during teledermatology consultations was compared with the result of dermoscopy or histology examination. Data were collected with the review of the EESZT (National eHealth Infrastructure system of Hungary) and e-Medsolution (T-Systems Hungary Ltd.) databases. In cases where result of face-to-face examination was not found, patients were contacted by telephone.

Results: 749 patients with 779 lesions were included with a mean age of 43.54 ± 21.03 years (male/female ratio: 37/63). Teledermatologists raised the possibility of skin cancer in 207 patients. Later, the result of histology examination confirmed the diagnosis of skin cancer in 121 cases. 15 out of all cases were diagnosed with malignant melanoma. Taking into account all differential diagnoses, the accuracy of our system for skin cancers screening was 85.3%, while the overall accuracy of the system was 87.9%. In terms of the concordance between teledermatology diagnoses and face-to-face examinations, substantial agreement (Cohen's kappa value = 0.754) was indicated.

Conclusion: High rate of agreement between online and face-to-face examinations showed that asynchronous teledermatology using mobile phone application provided effective skin cancer screening during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teledermatology contributed to the reduction of the burden of the health system by minimizing outpatient visits and to decrease the risk of acquiring COVID-19 infection.

Funding: EFOP-3.6.3-VEKOP-16-2017-00009