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 weaknesses of measuring telehealth using billing data
• 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 analysis examples for behavioral health, primary care and dementia.