Is Telehealth Better Used to Treat Patients or Help Other Physicians Treat Patients? An Agent-Based Modeling Study of Healthcare Provision
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Date
2022-01-04
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Telehealth, the delivery of medical care remotely, is hoped to increase access to specialty services and improve health care utilization. Physicians can provide telehealth to each other (e.g. specialist to generalist) or to patients. Specialists often treat complex patients who can be adequately cared for only in academic hospitals, suggesting that providing specialty services via telehealth will reallocate rather than reduce system utilization. Here I use agent-based modeling to simulate telehealth’s effects on clinical outcomes and system utilization in medical toxicology. I found that toxicologist-physician consultation increased patient health and decreased cost. Toxicologist-patient telehealth increased cost and system utilization but did not improve health. The effects were sensitive to patient complexity and the clinical efficacy of the toxicologist. Within the limitations of using simulated data and an incomplete model, these results suggest that telehealth is more cost-effective when used to provide toxicologist access to general physicians than to the public.
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Patient-facing Information Technology Implementations in Healthcare, agent-based modeling, healthcare service provision, telehealth
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10 pages
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Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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