Guettabi Mouhcine, Arnold Rabecca I, Ferucci Elizabeth D
Department of Economics and Finance, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA.
Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, Research Services Department, Division of Community Health Services, Anchorage, AK, USA.
Int J Circumpolar Health. 2025 Dec;84(1):2489195. doi: 10.1080/22423982.2025.2489195. Epub 2025 Apr 15.
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.
远程医疗的使用在全球范围内大幅增加，引发了关于其对健康结果、利用率和医疗成本影响的问题。利用阿拉斯加部落卫生系统（ATHS）和医疗补助计划的匿名数据，我们评估了一组远程医疗用户相对于匹配的非用户样本的支出模式是如何变化的。我们发现，与对照组相比，个人在首次接触远程医疗后往往会产生较低的医疗支出。我们的首选估计显示，医疗补助计划样本减少了1.14%，ATHS样本减少了0.7%。
