Most primary care telehealth visits don’t need in-person follow-ups

When telehealth use mushroomed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic many primary care physicians worried that remote visits wouldn’t meet their patients’ health needs and a lot of them would require in-person, follow-up visits. But a newly-released study finds those concerns were largely unfounded. The study from Epic Research evaluated 18.6 million telehealth visits with family, general internal and pediatric practitioners between March 2020 and October 2022. It found that 61% of the visits didn’t require an in-person follow-up visit in the same specialty within three months of the initial remote visit. Those findings might even underestimate how many visits didn’t require an in-person follow-up, according to the study’s authors. "Primary care physicians treat a wide variety of conditions, so the subsequent in-person visit might not have been related to the reason for the telehealth visit,” they write.