Women found more likely to utilize telehealth vs men
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Results presented at the International Geriatric Fracture Society Virtual Annual Meeting showed that among those aged 31 years or older, more women utilized telehealth visits than men, regardless of patient status or the platform used.
Lisa R. Coleman, MS, and colleagues categorized 5,489 patients who had a telehealth visit between March and July 2020 into groups based on self-reported sex and age, including 0 to 17 years, 18 to 30 years, 31 to 50 years, 51 to 64 years and 66 years and older. Researchers compared overall differences in telehealth usage among the age groups, as well as differences between new and established patients and differences in whether a video or telephone platform was used.
Prior to age stratification, Coleman noted 56.9% of women completed a telehealth visit vs. 43.1% of men.
“Then, after we stratified our data by age, we wanted to re-visit the total telehealth visits and we found that the overall proportion of women participating in a telehealth visit was significantly higher than men aged 31 [years] and older,” Coleman said in her presentation. “But, we did not have significant differences between patients younger than 30 years old.”
Similarly, significantly more women 31 years of age and older labeled as new patients completed telehealth visits vs. men, according to Coleman. She added significantly more women 18 years of age and older labeled as established patients completed telehealth visits.
“Finally, we wanted to look at the differences in types of telehealth used,” Coleman said. “We found that the proportion of video telehealth completed by women was significantly higher than the proportion completed by men in ages 31 [years] plus with, again, the added younger group of 18 to 30 years.”
Women 31 years of age and older also completed more phone telehealth visits than men, Coleman said.
“These findings not only suggest that musculoskeletal telehealth can be used in a practical method for delivering health care, but it also reveals that, even with utilizing this method of non-contact where you take out the barriers of traveling and having the fear of spreading corona[virus], that you can still see that gender could be a predictor of usage of health care as seen in similar research with in-person visits,” Coleman said.
Perspective
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I definitely think it is great that we look at quality/value-based topics when discussing telehealth. We want to ensure that we do not just tell everyone to utilize telehealth, but actually spend time and resources that telehealth can provide safe and equitable care compared to in-person visits.
Regarding the gender discrepancy, it has been widely shown that female [patients] do tend to utilize health care more readily and make more of the family-related health care decisions when it comes to in-person care. It is interesting to see that things hold true for virtual health care delivery as well.
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Coleman LR, et al. Age trending gender differences in musculoskeletal telehealth utilization. Presented at: International Geriatric Fracture Society Virtual Annual Meeting; Dec. 3 and 8, 2020.
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