New Telehealth Study Shows no Increase in Primary Care Utilization

Sarasota, FL (WorkersCompensation.com) – The rise of virtual care the last couple of years has been a hot topic. While studies have shown a definite increase, especially in mental health utilization, due in part to the pandemic, some reports such as the recent audit from CMS have questioned how well it is being used and is the use accurate.

Another concern regarding the use the use of telehealth has been an unnecessary increase in utilization.  However, according to a new study of primary care claims researchers have found little changed in how patients are seeing their providers.

MedStar Health, Stanford Medicine, and Intermountain Healthcare utilized a grant provided by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to analyze telehealth visits to see if there was an increase in primary care utilization. The study, published earlier this month in NPJ Digital Medicine, reviewed encounters from the three healthcare systems from 2019 to 2021. Researchers analyzed 4,114,651 primary care encounters belonging to 939,134 individual patients across commercial, Medicaid, Medicare, and other types of payers. Researchers sub-categorized patients, setting aside those patients that had at least one encounter in each of the three years as “matched”.  Of the matched category, there were 2,540,158 encounters belonging to 316,783 patients.

Overall, across all payers the average number of primary care visits per patient remained pretty much stable throughout 2019 to 2021. While Medicaid saw the highest average in 2020 at 2.58 average primary care visits for all patients and 3.34 for matched patients, 2019 held the highest average for Medicare patients with an average of 3.01 visits per patient, and 3.20 per matched patient. For commercial, the average visits per patient was 1.99 in 2019 and 2020 for all patients. For matched patients, the average number of primary care visits in 2019 was 2.33, and increased slightly in 2020 to 2.38 but decreased in 2021 to 2.30. For all other payers, the average number of visits in 2019 for all patients was 1.59, and for matched patients was 1.90. The average decreased for all patients in 2020 to 1.57 visits, but increased for matched patients at 1.94. For 2021, the average for all patients returned to the 2019 average at 1.59, and the average for matched patients dropped to 1.85.

Researchers determined that those patients that had multiple visits tended to use telehealth more than those that only had one encounter per year. This indicates that the patients with the most utilization of telehealth are those with chronic conditions that require more frequent visits. The researchers concluded that telehealth is not resulting in additional primary care visits, but is serving as a substitute for an in person visit. 

Based on the results of the study, the group has received an additional $2 million grant to expand the study with the Connected CARE—Care Access, Research, Equity—& Safety Consortium. According to a recent PR News press release, the new program will take a deeper holistic dive into chronic health conditions across more specialties. 

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