Dermatol Surg. 2021 Apr 27. doi: 10.1097/DSS.0000000000003062. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The reallocation of health care resources to focus on the acute care needs of COVID-19 patients leads to a delay and deferral of outpatient surgical procedures such as Mohs surgery.
OBJECTIVE: Planning for the resumption of regular outpatient surgical care and preparing for future surges in COVID-19 cases requires identifying surrogate markers of health care demand.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: United States national and state-based Google search data for “Mohs surgery” and other common elective surgical and cosmetic procedures were evaluated. These were compared with national and state-wide COVID-19 case number and death data from the Johns Hopkins University. Pearson correlation coefficients were generated to assess the association between COVID-19 cases and deaths with Google search trends.
RESULTS: Search volume for “Mohs surgery” and other elective surgical and cosmetic procedures significantly decreased as the number of new deaths from COVID-19 increased. Statistically significant inverse correlation was noted between “Mohs surgery” search volume and new COVID-19 deaths on a national and state-based level.
CONCLUSION: Search metric analysis may be used as part of a big data model to help predict health care demand during the reopening phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
PMID:33927090 | DOI:10.1097/DSS.0000000000003062
