Increasing the Use of Telemedicine: A Field Experiment

María P. González and Carlos Scartascini

No 12850, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: Patients are reluctant to use telemedicine health services. Telemedicine is an “experience good,” one that can be accurately evaluated and compared to its substitute (in this case, in-person visits) only after the product has been adopted and experienced. As such, an intervention that increases the probability of a first experience can have lasting effects. This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment conducted in collaboration with a health insurance company in Argentina. During the intervention, about two thousand households with no previous experience with telemedicine received periodic e-mails with information about the available services. It effectively increased the take-up and demand for telemedicine. Within the first eight months of the experiment, patients assigned to the treatment group were 6pp more likely to have used the service at least once (12pp higher for those who opened at least one e-mail.) This first use led to large cumulative effects over time. After eight months, the number of virtual consultations by the treatment group was six times larger than those of the control group. These results provide additional evidence about how information interventions can increase technological take-up within the health sector and add to the understanding of how behavioral barriers affect patients resistance to technological adoption.

Keywords: behavioral biases; Field experiment; Telemedicine; health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D83 I11 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hea and nep-nud
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... Field-Experiment.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:12850

DOI: 10.18235/0004900

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().