Japan Association for Medical Informatics

The 40th Joint Conference on Medical Informatics / APAMI2020

The 40th Joint Conference on Medical Informatics / APAMI2020

Nov 18, 2020 - Nov 23, 2020
Actcity Hamamatsu

[AP1-E2-3-03] Correlation of COVID-19 and Population-Level Interest in Telemedicine: Time-Lagged Analysis Using Google Trend

*Takuya Kinoshita1, Takehiro Matsumoto1,2, Naota Taura1,2, Tetsuya Usui2,3, Mayumi Nishiguchi2, Hozumi Horita2, Kazuhiko Nakao2 (1. Department of Medical Informatics, Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Japan, 2. Department of Medical Informatics, Nagasaki University Hospital, Japan, 3. Department of Laboratory Medicine, Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Japan)

COVID-19, Telemedicine, Telehealth, Pandemic

Due to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the government announced a state of emergency and quarantine, which gained interest in telemedicine from both patients and health care workers. However, there is no study in Japan about investigating the population-level interest in telemedicine and COVID-19 pandemic.
We used confirmed COVID-19 cases and web search volume of “telemedicine” in Japanese. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to measure the association. Time-lagged correlation analysis was performed for potential time-lag and a sensitivity analysis was performed to consider potential confounders.
We found a correlation (r=0.610) between each other with strongest correlation obtained after two days the press release (r=0.765). This study demonstrated the population-level interest in telemedicine increases with the trend of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Japan.