In recent years, telemedicine has been seen as a promising area of innovation in healthcare delivery. But for reasons that include licensing, reimbursement, and regulatory restrictions, its adoption had remained largely limited to small-scale programmes targeting remote locations, late hours, or specific conditions (Tuckson et al. 2017). For example, in the US, remote visits accounted for less than 1% of primary care visits before 2020 (Dorsey and Topol 2016).
This landscape abruptly changed in 2020. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, facilitated by rapid changes in regulation and increased demand, telemedicine use rate rose sharply. At the height of the pandemic, telemedicine visits accounted for a substantial share of visits, and the share has remained persistently higher than the baseline ever since (Mehrotra et al. 2020, Patel et al. 2021).
This watershed moment…
