New Study Finds Telehealth Outperforms In-Person Care in HEDIS Measures

Researchers have found that telehealth performed better than in-person care in 11 of 16 HEDIS quality performance measures, but that doesn't mean virtual care is superior to the office visit.

New research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds that telehealth was superior to in-person care in 11 of 16 quality performance measures for primary care.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Robert Graham Center in Washington DC and Pennsylvania-based Wellspan Health, focused on more than 526,000 patients receiving healthcare services at roughly 200 Wellspan Health outpatient sites between March 1, 2020, and November 30, 2021, and used HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) measurements.

The researchers, led by Derek Baughman, MD, of the Robert Graham Center and Wellspan Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and Yalda Jabbarpour, MD, and John Westfall, MD, MPH, both of the Robert Graham Center, said the results don't mean that health systems should close their clinics and focus on virtual care. Rather, they should offer telehealth as a part of the overall care plan, particularly for those who face barriers to accessing in-person care.

The study noted that in-person care showed better results for all medication-based measures, while telehealth offered better results in testing and counselling measures, such as vaccinations, chronic disease testing, and cancer and depression screenings.

"Notwithstanding the statistical significance, the clinical relevance of these findings is perhaps more meaningful at the population health level for evaluating the outcomes of adding telemedicine as a care venue," Baughman and his colleagues noted. "Moreover, telemedicine exposure (especially blended office and telemedicine care) likely simulates a likely real-life scenario for the health consumer."

"Practically, these findings provide reassurance for health entities seeking to add telemedicine to their care capacity without reducing quality of care," they added. "And as we found, embracing telemedicine for enhancing certain aspects of care might be an avenue for enhancing quality performance in primary care."

Baughman and his team said it wasn't clear why telehealth outperformed in-person care, though they noted that a telehealth platform offers better opportunities for care providers to reach out multiple times to patients to "engage in quality measure-promoting intervention." They also noted that some treatments, such as the initiation of a lifelong or life-changing medication program, are best begun in person,  and perhaps shifted to virtual platforms for follow-up.

"Future studies could provide more granularity on optimizing the specific role of telemedicine in clinical scenarios, eg, understanding whether there is an association between stages of hypertension and effect modification attributable to the management venue or an association between venue and number of blood pressure medications," they wrote. "This would provide insight on where to invest in health care infrastructure and what clinical venue would be most valuable. This could also guide venue selection for patients initiating antihypertensive therapy vs patients requiring a third antihypertensive. Such insight would promote win-win environments to increase value: improved health outcomes for patients and incentive for clinicians and health systems operating in value-based care models."