Tele-Follow-Up and Outpatient Care

Abstract

We examine the application of telemedicine for follow-up care (i.e., tele-follow-up). By collaborating with a large Asian hospital that sequentially adopted the tele-follow-up service in different departments, we leverage the difference-in-differences design and find that the adoption of telemedicine significantly increases the follow-up volume by 54%. Moreover, telemedicine generates positive spillover effects on onsite care provision, with onsite follow-up visits increasing by 10.7% and onsite initial visits increasing by 5.7%. The mechanism test shows that the treatment effect is heterogeneous by patients' cost sensitivity to onsite follow-up care. Finally, we show that tele-follow-up improves patient care quality, as evidenced by a significant reduction in the readmission rate, which reinforces the value of tele-follow-up applications.