It is unknown how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted traditional measures of retention in HIV care. We calculated six different retention measures at an urban HIV care clinic for two time periods: pre-pandemic, and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with and without inclusion of telehealth appointments. Spearman rank correlation was used to assess correlation between different measures of retention. For both the pre-pandemic and pandemic time periods, there was strong correlation among measures of missed visits (range 0.857-0.957). More patients were considered retained in care during the pandemic when telehealth appointments were included in the analysis.
Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Continuum of care; HIV; Retention in care; Telehealth.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.