National Trends of Telehealth Use in Medicare Annual Wellness Visits.

Abstract

Introduction: In response to COVID-19, Medicare began reimbursing for Annual Wellness Visits (AWVs) via telehealth in March 2020. Little is known about nationwide utilization of telehealth AWVs as a preventive care service among Medicare beneficiaries.

Methods: We used 100% Medicare data on payment for physician services between 2020 and 2022 to calculate total and telehealth AWVs stratified by specialty.

Results: Between 2020 and 2022, physicians performed a total of 24.7 million AWVs corresponding to $3.2 billion in payments from Medicare. Over this period, AWV utilization increased from 7.8 million services in 2020 to 8.6 million services in 2022. Telehealth AWVs accounted for 6.7% of all AWVs in 2020 and 2.1% of all AWVs in 2022. Primary care physicians provided the most telehealth AWVs (96.8%), compared to medical subspecialists (1.6%) and other specialists (1.6%) (p = .042). Family medicine physicians provided approximately half of all telehealth AWVs in 2020 (46.3%) and 2022 (51.6%).

Discussion: Despite increasing utilization of AWVs overall, telehealth AWV utilization decreased during our study period. Telehealth AWVs were most frequently conducted by primary care physicians, with a majority by family medicine physicians in the study period's final year. Our findings highlight potential challenges of providing AWVs via telehealth at broader scale, but also underscore the feasibility of providing telehealth AWVs. As they consider long-term telehealth reimbursement policy, leaders can prioritize how telehealth complements in-person care to promote broader adoption of preventive services.