The New England Journal of Medicine: Wearable Digital Health Technology Researchers from MIT announced a series on the clinical applications of wearable digital health technologies, such as telehealth and RPM devices. The series aims to provide real-world examples of how wearable DHT is increasingly being applied in clinical situations today and how such uses are likely to expand or be constrained until they are fully implementable into health care systems and reimbursable by medical insurance plans.

Epic Research: Telehealth Utilization Higher Than Pre-Pandemic Levels, but Down from Pandemic Highs Though the overall share of telehealth visits has dropped, it accounts for 37 percent of mental health and 11 percent of infectious disease visits. The data from Epic Research aims to provide insights into telehealth use trends across specialties in 2023 compared to before and during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The proportion of telehealth visits peaked across all specialties in Q2 2020, with the highest telehealth use rates seen in mental health (65.5 percent), endocrinology (55.5 percent), geriatrics (55.2 percent), transplant (52.2 percent), and gastroenterology (51.5 [...]

California Health Care Foundation: Telehealth Outcomes and Impact on Care Delivery: A Review of Evidence The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly reshaped health care delivery, notably with a surge in telehealth use driven by changes in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. The ensuing wave of research, spanning over 80 studies from 2021 to 2022, explored the impact of telehealth on health outcomes and care delivery. This literature review examines the concerning lack of examination of disparities among patient demographic groups, such as income, age, language, and race. Also, there are significant gaps in research on telephone-based care, hybrid care, multimodal telehealth, and the [...]

JAMA Network: Expiration of State Licensure Waivers and Out-of-State Telemedicine Relationships Following the expiration of waivers enabling out-of-state telehealth visits, patients tended to stop seeing the physician rather than switch to in-person care. The study shows that in states with expired waivers, patients with out-of-state telehealth relationships were less likely to participate in any post-period visits. Patients with out-of-state relationships were less likely to have telehealth or in-person visits after waiver expiration. This finding was most prominent when the patient and clinician were over 321.9 km apart. The results support the need to reform state licensure. Among the small number of telemedicine [...]