Telehealth use among pediatric Alabama Medicaid enrollees, March-December 2020: Variations by race/ethnicity & place of residence

During the early days and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare facilities experienced a slump in non-COVID-related visits, and there was an increasing interest in telehealth to deliver healthcare services for adult and pediatric patients. The study investigated telehealth use variation by rac...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2023-06, Vol.18 (6), p.e0287598-e0287598
Main Authors: Sen, Bisakha, Rahim, Md Jillur, McDougal, Julie, Sharma, Pradeep, Yang, Nianlan, Brisendine, Anne, Liu, Ye, Nghiem, Van, Becker, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Alabama
Child
Children
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
Earth Sciences
Ethnicity
Evaluation
Gender
Government programs
Health aspects
Health care
Health care delivery
Health care facilities
Health services
Health Services Accessibility
Hispanic people
Households
Humans
Medicaid
Medical care
Medicare
Medicine and Health Sciences
Minority & ethnic groups
Observational studies
Pandemics
Pediatrics
People and places
Population
Postal codes
Poverty
Residence Characteristics
Rural areas
Telemedicine
United States
Urban areas
Utilization
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:During the early days and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare facilities experienced a slump in non-COVID-related visits, and there was an increasing interest in telehealth to deliver healthcare services for adult and pediatric patients. The study investigated telehealth use variation by race/ethnicity and place of residence for the pediatric enrollees of the Alabama Medicaid program. This retrospective observational study examined Alabama Medicaid claims data from March to December 2020 for enrollees less than 19 years. There were 637,792 pediatric enrollees in the Alabama Medicaid program during the study period, and 16.9% of them had used telehealth to meet healthcare needs. This study employed a multivariate Poisson mixed-effects model with robust error variance to obtain differences in telehealth utilization and found that Non-Hispanic Black children were 80% as likely, Hispanic children were 55% as likely, and Asian Children were 46% as likely to have used telehealth compared to Non-Hispanic White children. Pediatric enrollees in large rural areas and isolated areas were significantly less likely (IRR: 0.90 for both, p
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0287598