The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Telemedicine
The use of telemedicine was quite limited in most OECD countries before the COVID-19 pandemic, held back by regulatory barriers and hesitancy from patients and providers. In early 2020, as COVID-19 massively disrupted in-person care, governments moved quickly to promote the use of telemedicine. The number of teleconsultations skyrocketed, playing a vital role in maintaining access to care, but only partly offsetting reductions in in-person care. This report provides an overview of the use of telemedicine in OECD countries, describing how governments scaled up remote care during the pandemic and exploring the impact that this massive shift to remote care has had on health care system performance. Telemedicine may be here to stay, but questions remain concerning how to regulate its use, how to pay for it, how to integrate it with in-person care, and how to make sure that it constitutes good value for money for all. This report puts forth priorities for policy makers to inform the discussion and to promote the best use of remote care services in the future.
The impact of telemedicine on health care system performance
The COVID‑19 pandemic has provided a great natural experiment in the utilisation of telemedicine services, creating opportunities to explore the impact of remote care services on different aspects of health care system performance, from quality, to access and cost-effectiveness. Yet only ten OECD countries have collected data or conducted studies on the impact of telemedicine on quality indicators since the start of the pandemic. This chapter provides an overview of how telemedicine services affect health care system performance, showing that there is clear evidence that remote care services are good value for money for patients, but that more work is needed to understand the impact on health system efficiency and waste.
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