Rural communities use telehealth less, but not because they don’t want it

Rural communities face a higher chronic disease burden — whether in the form of high blood pressure, diabetes, COPD or lower back pain — but they aren’t using telehealth as much as their urban counterparts. 

Liz Carey reports for The Daily Yonder the results of a study by Elevance Health Public Policy Foundation that found only 4.6% of chronic care visits in rural areas were executed via telehealth, compared to 7.5% in urban areas, no matter the insurance type. Since an initial telehealth surge during the COVID-19 pandemic and a spike in 2022, rates have been down everywhere. Rural communities are consistently at the tail-end. 

The study didn’t look at the causes for this gap, but “it does show that more needs to be understood in terms of how rural communities use telehealth.” Medicare clients, who are mostly elderly, use telehealth the least. 

But Dr. Sira Haeni, a maternal fetal medicine specialist and the CEO of Ouma Health, a maternity telehealth practice with clients in all 50 states, said he doesn’t see a gap; many of his patients prefer telehealth to avoid long driving times to and from a city. He thinks underutilization of the technology in rural areas is because of broadband access.

“If you look at the independent research on this, broadband itself explains a lot of this utilization gap, and the counties that lack the broadband access oftentimes have the lower utilization,” he said. “It’s not so much that the rural patients don’t want to access telehealth, it’s just that they can’t access telehealth. As a country, we’ve failed rural America in terms of getting the broadband access that was promised to them over the last few administrations.”