For people visiting a neurology doctor for the first time, a new study finds there is no difference in the time it takes to seek treatment sooner between a virtual visit and an in-person visit. This study was published on April 22, 2026. Neurology®Medical Journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Although telemedicine has been shown to improve access to care for people in rural areas and those without transportation, and telemedicine has received high satisfaction scores from both clinicians and patients, less research has been done on how effective virtual visits are compared to in-person visits, especially for new neurology patients. We looked at how often people returned to the neurology clinic or needed to go to the emergency department or hospital within three months of their first visit, to see if virtual visits led to the need for more detailed follow-up evaluations or more serious problems than in-person visits. ”
Chloe E. Hill, M.D., study author, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, member of the American Academy of Neurology
For the study, researchers reviewed electronic medical record data from three academic health systems to identify patients who first visited a neurology clinician between September 2020 and December 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers matched 8,202 virtual visits with 8,202 in-person visits. Participants were matched based on factors such as age, gender, and previous use of health care services. Patients were then divided into categories based on the reason for their visit, including dementia, epilepsy, headaches, peripheral neuropathy, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, sleep disorders, and other conditions.
When researchers compared virtual and in-person visits, they found that there was no difference in follow-up visits to neurology clinics between virtual and in-person visits, with one-quarter of people making a second visit within 90 days.
Emergency department visits and hospitalizations within 90 days were similar.
Focusing on individual symptoms, dementia had higher 90-day follow-up after in-person visits, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis had higher 30- and 90-day follow-up after virtual visits, and headache had higher 90-day follow-up after virtual visits. For stroke, more hospitalizations occurred within 90 days after the virtual visit.
“Our results suggest that virtual visits are appropriate for initial neurological assessment across a variety of conditions,” Hill said. “We found that neurology patients who received their first virtual visit did not typically have higher rates of emergency department visits or hospitalizations. Future research should more thoroughly investigate whether people with different conditions may benefit more from certain types of visits.”
A limitation of the study was that the data were from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, before a vaccine was available and may have affected care-seeking behavior. Hill said data from recent years may show different patterns of health care utilization and should be analyzed in future studies.
This research was supported by the American Academy of Neurology.
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American Academy of Neurology
Reference magazines:
Hill, C.E. others. (2026). Virtual neurology outpatient care and in-person neurology outpatient care. Neurology. DOI: 10.1212/wnl.0000000000214989. https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214989
