Dive Brief:
- A Health Affairs study of adult users of a national telemedicine service found that the service seemed to be expanding access out to patients not connected with other providers.
- To implement the study, researchers reviewed records from 3,701 patient virtual "visits" using the service, all covered by a health plan offered by the California Public Employees' Retirement System.
- The researchers found little evidence of misdiagnosis or treatment failure among the service's users.
Dive Insight:
As effective as it can be, telemedicine isn't for everyone. The researchers speculate that users attracted to virtual medicine tend to be a more technologically-savvy group, and note that their research established that this group was younger and more affluent than average patients. Still, it seems clear that telemedicine has tremendous promise for bringing at least some form of medical care to places where it's in short supply. I'm eager to see more studies of how telemedicine helps the medically underserved.