A new study with funding from the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) and the Center for Population Health Information Technology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, plus support from Blue Intelligence, has been published online in JAMA Network Open.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health along with collaborators at Blue Health Intelligence and the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), assessed the role of telehealth and its impact on outcomes associated with follow-up care during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.
The study discusses whether patients having an initial telehealth encounter had a different outcome than those receiving in-person care. The study cohort included over 40 million privately insured patients under the age of 65, including children, during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic from July to December 2020.
Important study findings include:
- On average, patients having an initial telehealth consult for a new health condition did not require more unplanned hospitalizations or follow-up emergency department visits within 14 days of their initial consult as compared with patients making an initial in-person visit
- During the study period enrollees ages 18-34 had the highest uptake of telehealth appointments with approximately 25% of this group’s ambulatory visits taking place virtually
- 17% of non-emergency office or outpatient visits took place via telehealth during the same period in 2019
- Approximately 14% of all enrollees had one or more telehealth visits during the six month study period as compared to less than 1% of enrollees using telehealth during the same period in 2019
“This study appears to be the first published assessment of clinically relevant outcomes comparing telehealth and in-person encounters in a nationally-representative population, and one of the most comprehensive telehealth assessments from late 2020, looking at factors associated with changing patterns of telehealth use beyond the initial months of the pandemic,” said Joe Kvedar, MD, Chair of the Board of the ATA.
The authors of the study included Elham Hatef, Daniel Lans, Stephen Bandeian, Elyse Lasser, Jennifer Goldsack, and Jonathan Weiner.
The study is titled Telehealth in a Transformed Healthcare System: Outcomes of In-Person and Telehealth Ambulatory Encounters During COVID-19 Within a Large Commercially Insured Cohort
Go to https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle for the study.