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The COVID-19 crisis underscored pre-existing health disparities, including telehealth inequities, notably among financially disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. Regulation changes fell short of mitigating the obstacles to telehealth accessibility among individuals in these communities. The intertwining of poverty and race led to the exacerbation of health disparities, with these demographics experiencing a lack of access to essential telehealth resources, such as appropriate devices, reliable Internet connection, adequate privacy, and digital literacy.
On May 12, 2023, a study published in the Journal of Internet Research by researchers Cynthia Williams and Di Shang focused solely on telehealth use in impoverished populations, as defined by federal guidelines. Hypotheses include systemic differences in telehealth usage among those living at or below 200% of the federal poverty level and associations between telehealth use and factors like education, employment status, age, gender, and household income. The aim is to inform strategies to promote telehealth use among the US impoverished to address the current inequities.
Health Disparity Study Methods
Data for this study was sourced from the COVID-19 Research Database Consortium, managed by Datavant. This consortium, consisting of private-public partnerships, offered access to two linked databases: Office Ally, with deidentified claims data from 100 million patients, and Analytics IQ PeopleCore Consumer, a representative database of 242.5 million US adults, providing patient-level data on health characteristics and care. The researchers merged these datasets using common identifiers to analyze telehealth usage across socioeconomic and demographic indicators. Telehealth was defined as web-based communications, including remote monitoring, phone calls, and video conferencing.
The study from March 2020 to April 2021 examined telehealth usage in 2,850,831 patients living at or below 200% of…