Examining Individuals’ Use of The Internet for Healthcare Activities Over Time: Statistical Analysis Of NHIS Data (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Telehealth is an increasingly important component of healthcare services. Telehealth services may present an opportunity to increase the equity, accessibility, and effectiveness of healthcare. As such, it is critical that telehealth design focuses on reducing the barriers to access and usability that may impair some telehealth users. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to identify different demographic characteristics, behaviors, or opinions that may predict groups who are likely to face a barrier to use telehealth services. METHODS We utilized data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and multiple logit regression models focused on different aspects of telehealth to examine three different avenues of telehealth service: looking up health information online, scheduling an appointment online, and communicating with a care provider through email in order to consider the ways in which different telehealth services may face different barriers. RESULTS Our result suggests that middle-aged and elderly respondents were significantly less likely to use technology to look up health information online or schedule an appointment online, versus younger individuals. Specifically, our analysis found that middle-aged adults were found to have a higher odds ratio than older adults (0.83 versus 0.65) for looking up health information online. We also found that there were differences in age groups for using technology to perform healthcare-related tasks. In terms of searching health information and scheduling appointments online, we found differences between men and women with women being significantly more likely than men to look up health information online, schedule an appointment online, and also communicate with a care provider through email. Across all the investigated variables, we found that the rates of utilizing the Internet for looking up health information online, scheduling an appointment online, and communicating with a care provider over email increased substantially across the study period. The impact of costs was inconsistent across the different models in our analysis. We also found that there is a strong correlation between respondents’ collaboration in their personal health and the likelihood that they would utilize telehealth services to meet these needs. CONCLUSIONS This analysis provides an exploratory look at the data to highlight barriers that may impact a user’s ability to access telehealth services in the context of other potential predictor variables to account for the real-world variability that these may present. Future work should examine the complex relationships of those variables and understand how these interactions are correlated with the respondents’ use of telehealth.