EXPRESS: Tele-Follow-Up and Outpatient Care

Follow-up appointments are crucial for maintaining continuity of care, yet patients often encounter various barriers to accessing these services. In this study, we examine the potential of telemedicine applications for follow-up care (tele-follow-up), focusing on its impact on care access, service efficiency, and care quality. By collaborating with a large hospital that implemented tele-follow-up services across departments over time, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences design to identify the causal effects of tele-follow-up services. Our findings indicate that the adoption of tele-follow-up services increases total follow-up volume by 48.14%. Notably, we identify positive spillover effects on traditional onsite care, with onsite follow-up visits and initial visits increasing by 14.11% and 7.90%, respectively. We further investigate the mechanism underlying these results. On the demand side, patients with higher costs of accessing onsite follow-up care, such as those living in rural areas or with comorbidities, exhibit greater demand elasticity following the availability of the tele-follow-up channel. On the supply side, dedicating the telemedicine channel exclusively to follow-up care enhances physicians’ efficiency by enabling more focused practice across online and in-person work shifts. The increased access to follow-up services enabled by telemedicine further translates into better patient outcomes, as evidenced by a significant reduction in readmission rates. Our study demonstrates the value of tele-follow-up services and offers practical insights for healthcare decision-makers seeking to leverage digital health to enhance continuity of care.