STAT (8/5, Isselbacher) reports, “As [COVID-19] drives many patients away from in-person care and toward virtual visits, experts warn that the nation’s most vulnerable members may be shut out of … telehealth.” “A pair of new studies published this week show that there are barriers to virtual visits that regulatory changes alone can’t fix.” One “paper, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that 1 in 4 Medicare beneficiaries were stranded on the far side of the digital divide in 2018, with neither a home computer with a high-speed internet connection or a smartphone with a wireless plan.” Another study, also published in JAMA Internal Medicine, “looked at [2018] data from more than [4,500] Medicare beneficiaries over 65 who were part of a national dataset,” and “found that 20% of those individuals were ‘unready’ to use telemedicine services due to difficulty hearing, seeing, or communicating, in addition to dementia.”
Related Links:
— “Telemedicine is booming — but many people still face huge barriers to virtual care, “Juliet Isselbacher, STAT, August 5, 2020