Giving Compass' Take:

• As comfort with telehealth increases during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are still barriers, particularly for older adults, to receiving care during this time. 

• How can health professionals increase access to care for older adults during COVID-19? What are their most pressing health needs? Where are there opportunities for donors to help strengthen health services? 

• Read how hospital systems increase use of telehealth. 

One in four older Americans had a virtual medical visit in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of them by video, a new telehealth poll finds.

That’s much higher than the 4% of people over 50 who said they had ever had a virtual visit with a doctor in a similar poll taken in 2019.

Comfort levels with telehealth, also called telemedicine, have also increased, according to the University of Michigan’s National Poll on Healthy Aging.

In 2019, most older adults expressed at least one serious concern about trying a telehealth visit. But by mid-2020, the percentage with such concerns had eased, especially among those who had experienced a virtual visit between March and June of this year.

Yet, not all older adults see virtual care as an adequate substitute for in-person care, even in a pandemic, the findings show.

And 17% of people over 50 still say they have never used any sort of video conferencing tool for any reason, including medical care. While that’s 11 percentage points lower than in the 2019 poll, that lack of experience or access could be a barrier to receiving care without having to leave home as the pandemic continues to surge in dozens of states.

“These findings have implications for the health providers who have ramped up telehealth offerings rapidly and for the insurance companies and government agencies that have quickly changed their policies to cover virtual visits,” says Lorraine Buis, a health information technology researcher at the University of Michigan who helped design the poll and interpret its results.

Read the full article about telemedicine by Kara Gavin at Futurity.