Significant disparities found in telehealth use, especially among older patients
Inequities were found by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, and when someone used a language other than English.
, Associate Editor
After "COVID-19," one of the terms most people will remember best from 2020 is likely to be "social distancing." While it most commonly applies to social gatherings with family and friends, it has impacted the way many receive medical care. Historically, the U.S. has been relatively slow to broadly adopt telehealth, largely emphasizing in-person visits.
But the coronavirus pandemic, especially in the spring of 2020, necessitated increased use of virtual or phone call visits, even prompting the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to relax some of its regulations, primarily for video-based telehealth. These large-scale changes made virtual care exponentially more popular than it had been even at the start of the calendar year.