No-show Rates for Telemedicine vs. In-person Appointments
Aug 29, 2022
FHPC researchers have published the results of a study on telemedicine and how it impacted no-show rates at Denver Health in the most recent issue of the Journal of Ambulatory Care Management.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the way we do business in many settings, including health care . Health care providers had to innovate and greatly expand their telemedicine options for patients. This change yielded results that could help answer critical questions about telemedicine and guide health care providers in developing more efficient practices for the practice of telemedicine in the future.
FHPC researchers analyzed more than 1.5 million scheduled appointments among Health First Colorado (Colorado's Medicaid program) members from a safety-net provider to establish how this shift affected health care access. Of the appointments, more than 200,000 were telemedicine appointments. The article answered the following questions:
- Was there a difference in no-show rates between in-person and telemedicine appointments for this population?
- Does providing an “audio-only” option increase health care access?
- How does access to health care differ by modality across race and demographic characteristics?
The findings demonstrated a significant improvement in appointment no-show rates when telemedicine was offered, in this case, driven by audio-only telemedicine among an urban Medicaid population. Although the findings showed higher no-show rates overall among Black/African American and Hispanic patients, they also suggest that the availability of audio-only telemedicine may facilitate decreasing racial/ethnic difference in no-show rates in these populations.
Read the abstract here, or students and staff associated with the Anschutz Medical Campus can log into Ovid to view the full text of the study here.