Kaiser Permanente, Spectrum Health and Jefferson Health teamed up to discover whether telehealth is effective in treating adults over the age of 60, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare.
The quality of telehealth visits for older adults has been heavily debated. The lack of access to the technical infrastructure needed to carry out visits has been speculated to be harmful to healthcare access. The three health systems looked retrospectively at telehealth visits to analyze if it can be an effective alternative to in-person visits.
Five details:
- Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente and Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Spectrum Health provided structured telehealth services for a set of established conditions, as defined by the health system. In comparison, Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health utilized an all-calls approach where telehealth services were deployed as an extension of the emergency department for any condition.
- More than 300,000 telehealth visits were examined across the three health systems. Telehealth visits were successful in resolving both urgent and non-emergent needs in 84-86.7 percent of cases.
- When telehealth visits were conducted as a follow-up, 95 percent of cases were resolved in fewer than three visits for both telehealth and in-person visits.
- At Kaiser Permanente, headaches and migraines had the highest degree of difference in being resolved during telehealth visits compared to in-person visits. It was resolved 90.9 percent of the time during in-person visits but only 77.7 percent of the time during telehealth visits.
- At Jefferson Health, the greatest difference was for gastrointestinal disorders, where telehealth visits resolved 69.2 percent of patients' concerns, compared to 90.6 percent during in-person visits.