University of Michigan researchers just delivered some compelling evidence that telehealth doesn’t increase wasteful care, and may actually reduce it in several key areas.
This wasn’t a small study. The analysis in JAMA Network Open leveraged Medicare FFS claims data spanning 578k beneficiaries across 2,552 primary care practices between 2019 and 2022.
The researchers tracked eight measures of “low-value care” – services that provide little clinical benefit while racking up costs – across four categories: office-based, laboratory, imaging, and mixed-modality services.
The practices with the highest telehealth usage (top third) showed:
- Significant reductions in unnecessary cervical cancer screenings (-2.9 per 1,000 beneficiaries)
- Lower rates of low-value thyroid testing (-40 per 1,000 beneficiaries)
- No increase in wasteful imaging or other diagnostic services
Low-value care costs the healthcare system close to $100B annually, and while wasteful services have been extensively looked at using Medicare data, this was the first study to do so within the context of telehealth.
- On one hand, virtual visits eliminate chances for clinicians to perform low-value services that need to be performed in-person.
- On the other, it’s hard to imagine that the inability to conduct a physical examination won’t lead to more clinical uncertainty and low-value diagnostic testing, although that’s exactly what this research seems to disprove.
The Takeaway
This study tackles one of telehealth’s most persistent criticisms head-on, and the lack of a clear link between telehealth and low-value care should reassure policymakers weighing how to finance and regulate the segment going forward.
