Lydia Elle decided to skip her annual physical last year. Her daughter was home doing virtual school, and Ms. Elle had little time to run out for an appointment. She also worried about contracting Covid-19 at a doctor’s office.

Now, she’s catching up. After a physical this spring, Ms. Elle has two specialist appointments this month. “Once they let my daughter go back to school, I felt safer to go back to the doctor,” says Ms. Elle, who is 40 years old and lives in Los Angeles. She has also used the time to reassess her care and switch practices, preferring one that integrates specialists under one roof and lets her communicate directly with practitioners.

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Many people who avoided appointments earlier in the pandemic are now working to schedule care. But after more than a year, it can be hard to know where to start.

Catch-up care has a long to-do list: giving priority to which doctors to visit first, keeping up with new screening guidelines and finding doctors after a pandemic relocation—on top of addressing health problems that have arisen from more than a year of stress and disruption. Here are some strategies for navigating the return to the doctor’s office.

Start with a wellness check

Primary-care doctors are intended to be the air-traffic controllers of your health, so a well visit is a good first step, says Natasha Bhuyan, a family physician in Phoenix at One Medical. “It’s a great starting point to touch on other topics,” she says. A primary-care doctor can help you create a road map for the screenings or specialist appointments you may have missed. Talk too about any health challenges that have developed during the pandemic. Dr. Bhuyan often sets aside time to talk about mental health, how activity levels have changed, and how people are adjusting to new ways of working.

Some people took a greater interest in tracking their own health during the pandemic, even if they weren’t seeing the doctor. Share those findings with your primary-care physician. Dr. Bhuyan says many patients come in with months of sleep-tracking data or fitness records from wearable devices, she says. “I would review that data, look for trends or areas of opportunity for improvement and come up with our game plan,” she says.

Ask about screenings you have missed—and guidelines that have changed

Some screening guidelines have shifted during the pandemic. People as young as 45 years old should now get screened for colon and rectal cancer, down from 50, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a medical panel whose advice helps determine federal policy. It also called for a significant expansion of CT scanning for smokers to detect lung cancer. “Often times people don’t even know what screenings they are due for or what they need,” Dr. Bhuyan says.

More specialists can now conduct initial appointments virtually.

More specialists can now conduct initial appointments virtually.

Photo: Getty Images

Make smart use of telemedicine to save time

The pandemic greatly expanded telemedicine, so if you need to schedule a bunch of catch-up appointments, figure out whether you can do any virtually. A dental cleaning, of course, needs to happen in person, but a virtual visit may make sense for specialists in fields like chronic illness management or behavioral health, says Joseph Kvedar, a Harvard Medical School professor and chairman of the American Telemedicine Association. More specialists can now conduct an initial appointment virtually, especially if it doesn’t require a physical examination, he adds. And you can often get a virtual visit sooner and with less waiting time than an in-person one.

Think carefully about switching doctors if you’ve moved

Many people moved from a city to the suburbs or even farther during the pandemic. It’s tricky to decide whether to stick with your old doctor or find a new one closer to home. But some doctors say that if it isn’t massively inconvenient, it’s best to maintain relationships with your existing doctors—especially if you’ve established a good relationship over years.

If you do need to make a switch, many hospital systems can view prior medical records via integrated software to make it easier to transfer your medical history, test results and other details. But it often requires some legwork on your part, at least at first. Making sure your earlier records are logged in the new provider’s system can preserve health information and increase the quality of your medical care, doctors say.

Expect to wait longer for appointments—so book them ASAP

With so many people making deferred appointments, many medical practices are booked up for months. Schedule appointments as soon as you can, especially if you don’t have much flexibility in dates or times. “A lot of specialists in the U.S. have superlong waiting periods,” says Ryan McBain, a health economist at Rand Corp. in Boston who has studied patterns of doctor visits throughout the pandemic.

Write to Alina Dizik at alina.dizik@wsj.com