Telehealth use and experiences among California adults
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Series Title(s):
- Issue brief (California HealthCare Foundation)
- Author(s):
- Hartman, Lacey, author
- Contributor(s):
- California HealthCare Foundation, issuing body.
- Publication:
- [Oakland, CA] : California Health Care Foundation, September 2023
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- Adult Delivery of Health Care Ethnic and Racial Minorities Health Care Surveys Health Inequities Medicaid Social Determinants of Health State Health Plans Telemedicine California
- Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of telehealth to provide health care when in-person visits were prohibited or discouraged. National data show dramatic increases in telehealth use. For instance, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 154% increase in telehealth use nationally in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the previous year. In Medicare, use of telehealth increased from 7% to 47% of fee-for-service beneficiaries between quarter one and quarter two of 2020. Use leveled off in 2022, but remained more than double the pre-pandemic levels at 15% in the third quarter of 2022. In California, the Medi-Cal program saw a rapid increase in telehealth use during the pandemic, increasing from 300 per 100,000 claims in February 2020 to 12,000 per 100,000 in April 2020. Use declined some during 2021, but it remained significantly higher than prepandemic levels at around 7,700 claims per 100,000 in December 2021. California’s Medi-Cal program is leveraging telehealth to meet patient needs. Many of the telehealth coverage and reimbursement flexibilities enacted during the pandemic were made permanent in 2022, including payment parity for services provided in person or by telehealth, such as phone visits. With the end of the public health emergency, there are important questions about how telehealth is being used to meet patient needs and which flexibilities should remain in place over the long term. This brief uses data from the 2021 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) to explore how the use of telehealth varies across subpopulations of adults in the state and reports how people that have used telehealth think the experience compared to in-person care, separately for video and phone visits. The brief concludes with a discussion of potential policy implications of the findings, and areas for future data collection and research.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-ND license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (10 pages))
- Illustrations:
- Illustrations
- NLM Unique ID:
- 9918734179806676 (See catalog record)
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/9918734179806676