Consultation frequency patterns for older patients in Danish general practice

Background There may be distinctly different ways for general practices to serve the growing population of older patients, providing them different combinations of face-to-face-, telephone-, and e-mail consultations, home visits, and chronic care reviews.

Aim To identify latent general practice profiles of frequency and combination of consultation types for older patients and relate them to practice characteristics.

Design & setting Register-based cohort study of all Danish citizens aged≥75 years.

Method For each of the years 2017-2021, a latent profile analysis was conducted on the practices’ frequencies of consultation types adjusting for patient population characteristics.

Results We identified a “Majority” and three temporary latent profiles of provision of consultation services to older patients: The “Phone heavy” profile (8-10% of practices, 2017-2019) providing nearly double the telephone consultations as the “Majority” profile and was associated with the general practitioners being older and working singlehanded, the “High frequency” profile (12-14% of practices, 2017-2018) providing higher levels of face-to-face, telephone, and e-mail consultations than the “Majority” profile, and the “Phone and e-mail heavy” profile (7% of practices, 2020) providing more e-mail than face-to-face consultations, and more of each consultation than the “Majority” profile. The number of profiles decreased from 3 in 2017 to only the “Majority” profile 2021.

Conclusion There is a trend towards a more uniform pattern of consultations for older patients in general practice. It is unknown whether high provision of certain types of consultations in general practice has downstream effects, such as decreased need for hospital- and out-of-hours services.