Telehealth Use Among Older, Rural, Uninsured Adults Spikes

February 28, 2023 - Groups with typically low telehealth use rates experienced year-over-year increases in 2022, according to new survey data from Rock Health.

Rock Health conducted the survey between July 12 and August 22, 2022, polling 8,014 US adults. This is the latest in a series of annual surveys Rock Health has conducted since 2015 to assess consumer attitudes and behaviors related to digital healthcare. Since 2020, around 8,000 adults have been polled every year.

The 2022 survey results show that 80 percent of all respondents reported accessing care via telehealth at some point, up 8 percentage points from 72 percent in 2021.

Telehealth use has grown across many traditionally underserved groups. Telehealth use among respondents aged 55 years and up jumped 12 percentage points from 64 percent in 2021 to 76 percent in 2022. Similarly, respondents living in rural areas and respondents without health insurance experienced year-over-year increases of 13 percentage points from 2021, with telehealth use among rural respondents rising to 73 percent and uninsured respondents to 50 percent.

Telehealth use also increased significantly among women and Hispanic respondents. Eighty-two percent of each group reported having used telemedicine in 2022, with both groups experiencing a jump of 9 percentage points from 2021.

In addition, LGBQA+, transgender, and non-binary respondents reported higher rates of telehealth use than their heterosexual and cisgender peers. In particular, the vast majority of transgender adults (98 percent) said they used telehealth in 2022, up 2 percentage points from the year before.

The new data also reveals changes in telehealth modality use. While live video telemedicine use remained stable in 2022 compared to 2021, survey results show increases across all other telemedicine modalities. Use of telephone-only calls for telehealth visits jumped 12 percentage points to 57 percent in 2022, health app/website use increased 11 percentage points to 48 percent, email use rose 9 percentage points to 43 percent, and text message use spiked 8 percentage points to 36 percent.

"Multiple factors contribute to non-video telemedicine use, including the continued lag in national broadband coverage," the report states. "Another likely contributor is the growing supply of non-video appointment offerings, bolstered by provider organizations."

Further, the survey shows that despite significant increases in telehealth use, the adoption of wearables has not seen major jumps since 2019.

In 2020, 43 percent of respondents said they owned a wearable device, up from 33 percent in 2019. But, since then, this figure has increased only slightly to 45 percent in 2021 and 46 percent in 2022.

While a larger proportion (74 percent) of younger respondents with higher income and higher educational attainment reported owning a wearable, ownership among respondents who were older, with lower incomes, and with lower educational attainment reached an all-time high of 21 percent in 2022.

But data security and privacy concerns remain. While most respondents (70 percent) are willing to share their health data with their clinician, less than half are willing to share data with insurance companies (46 percent) and pharmacies (44 percent).

Additionally, only 15 percent said they are willing to share data with health technology companies, and 11 percent with their employer.

Data privacy concerns related to telehealth have attracted the attention of lawmakers as well.

Earlier this month, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Susan Collins (R-ME), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) sent letters to three telehealth companies detailing concerns over their health data privacy practices.

The senators noted reports that the companies — Cerebral, Monument, and WorkIt Health — have been tracking their customers' sensitive health information and sharing it with third-party advertisers such as Meta and Google.

"This data is extremely personal, and it can be used to target advertisements for services that may be unnecessary or potentially harmful physically, psychologically, or emotionally," they wrote in their letter to Cerebral.

The senators asked that all three companies answer important questions about how they use the data.