Although virtual health care has been on the horizon for years, telehealth use exploded in the early days of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: It increased by more than 4,000 percent in the first months of the pandemic, relative to the same period in 2019 (FAIR Health, 2020). Yet increased use of telehealth offset only about half of the decline in in-person visits, suggesting that a significant amount of services were deferred (Cantor et al., 2022).

RAND Health Care researchers have been studying telehealth's effects on care quality, access, and equity to gain insights on the uses of and preferences regarding telehealth before and during the pandemic. Prepandemic policies regarding telehealth service reimbursement, which had been in place to limit overspending and potential fraud, were temporarily waived to ease access to care during the public health emergency (PHE) (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2021; Public Law 116-136, 2020). The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 (Public Law 117-328) preserves the effects of those waivers until December 31, 2024, but policymakers and payers will eventually need to make long-term decisions regarding telehealth.

The key findings from recent RAND research on telehealth synthesized in this brief will help policymakers and payers make informed decisions about telehealth policies as the PHE ends.

Using telehealth to help patients and providers maintain access to care has rightly been a top priority during the pandemic. But some newer uses of telehealth, such as audio-only visits, have raised concerns about care quality. Telehealth access appears to be uneven, with individuals in low-income or rural areas having low access to broadband internet that enables video calls. These issues will need continued research, and studies will need to continue investigating telehealth's effects on costs, health outcomes, and health equity (Mehrotra and Uscher-Pines, 2022). Policymakers might also want to begin thinking of telehealth less as an either-or proposition (i.e., either telehealth or office visits) and more in terms of how the two modalities can be used in a hybrid format.

Read the full article about healtcare research on telehealth by Lori Uscher-Pines and Shira H. Fischer at RAND Corporation.