Headline

Report summarizes the evidence on outcomes for patients participating in various telehealth delivered services, including different modalities, such as telephone and video.

Context

Use of telehealth services grew substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many new studies have evaluated the impact of this growth in telehealth services on health care outcomes. This report summarized more than 80 studies (including systematic reviews) published from 2021 to 2022 and focused on the impact of telehealth services.

Findings

This report summarizes the large body of evidence on the impact of telehealth in treating specific conditions and the impact of specific telehealth modalities. Modalities include live video; telephone; email, text, and chat; e-visits; store-and-forward; and hybrid care. Notably, few studies addressed how telehealth compares with in-person care among specific patient demographic groups. The report includes a technical supplement that describes studies related to telehealth outcomes by modality and health conditions; and on multimodality and cross-modality studies.

Takeaways                                                                      

Policymakers and payers can use this report to better understand the effectiveness of telehealth services as compared to in-person care. Care providers can apply these findings to inform practice guidelines for using telehealth.