Use and Usefulness of Billing Data to Estimate Telehealth Reach and Outcomes

Publicly available licensed, data are increasingly being used in telehealth studies, but their usefulness for measuring telehealth vary. Our objective is to provide a succinct overview of strengths and weaknesses of using billing data to assist telehealth decision makers and data analysts in selecting data and interpreting published studies using such data.

We will:

• Describe their strengths and weakness of measuring telehealth using billing dat
• Show summary comparison tables for five different data sets
• Illustrate use of the data in US “heat maps” of population rates of telehealth use
• Discuss analyses examples for behavioral health, primary care and dementia.