Telemedicine Revolution: Cutting Unnecessary Health Tests, Study Finds
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Low-value care medical tests and procedures that provide little to no benefit to patients contribute to excess medical spending and both direct and cascading harm to patients. A research team from Mass General Brigham and their collaborators have found that telemedicine may help to reduce the use of low-value tests. The work is published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
“In theory, widespread adoption of telemedicine post-pandemic may influence low-value testing such as Pap smears and prostate cancer screenings in older adults, and imaging scans for straightforward cases of low back pain,” said lead author Ishani Ganguli, MD, MPH, of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of Mass General Brigham, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “But there was very limited evidence on this. We wanted to look at this question at a national level because there is active policy debate about whether and how Medicare should continue telemedicine coverage, hinging in large part on how telemedicine impacts care quality and spending.”
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