healthcare.utah.edu · Feb 17, 2026 · Collected from GDELT
Published: 20260217T023000Z
Telehealth visits are commonly used for mental and behavioral health care, and since the days of the early pandemic, patients have increasingly used virtual meetings with doctors to meet other health care needs. But the full scope of who’s accessing health care remotely—and why—is less clear. A new study of Medicare patients across the country has found that nearly half of telehealth visits are for non-mental health conditions, often chronic conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure. The results provide a crucial foundation to help shape health care policies and practices to make quality care accessible to all. The results are published in Annals of Internal Medicine. The researchers examined health care visit data from a nationally representative sample of nearly 15,000 Medicare users during 2021 to 2023 to learn how telehealth is being used nationwide. Nearly half of mental health appointments were performed remotely, amounting to 31 million annual visits. But there were almost as many telehealth appointments for non-mental health conditions: 29 million annually. The data suggests that people who are most medically vulnerable are more likely to use telehealth, the researchers say. Telehealth users are more likely to report limitations in activities of daily living, like bathing and getting dressed, and are more likely to report worse health overall. Liu speculates that telehealth might be especially useful for people with more medical challenges, helping to alleviate barriers to care that these populations might disproportionally face. “If you’re able to receive care at home, then it can potentially overcome some of those barriers,” he says. The results show that telehealth is an important avenue of care for non-mental health conditions, the researchers say. Knowing who uses telehealth, and why, can help guide informed decisions about how health systems provide care, which may help lead to more certainty for patients about how their care will be delivered and covered on an ongoing basis. “Navigating the insurance labyrinth of Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and supplemental plans is already a complicated task for any older adult,” says Alexander Chaitoff, MD, assistant professor of internal medicine at University of Michigan and second author on the paper. “Having more certainty on whether their telehealth care will be supported on a more permanent basis could be helpful, given how important it is for managing chronic conditions.” “It’s hard to imagine going back to a world where telehealth is a tiny fraction of all the health care that’s delivered,” Liu says. “It’s not the predominant mode of delivery, and it still has issues that need to be worked out. But I think with greater confidence and support for making telehealth coverage more permanent for non-mental health conditions, health systems will have additional incentive to invest in it and find ways to improve it.”