On telemedicine and healthcare spending

Abstract

The use of telemedicine has increased substantially worldwide prompting questions about its effect on health outcomes, utilisation rates, and healthcare costs. Using de-identified data from the Alaska Tribal Health System (ATHS) and Medicaid, we evaluate how spending patterns changed for a group of telemedicine users relative to a matched sample of non-users. We find that individuals tend to incur lower healthcare spending relative to the control group after first exposure to telemedicine. Our pre- ferred estimates show a 1.14% decrease for the Medicaid sample and a 0.7% decrease in the ATHS sample.

Keywords

• Telemedicine
• healthcare spending
• Alaska
• rural areas
• medicaid