Physicians continue to use telehealth at far higher levels than they did before the COVID-19 public health emergency, but an AMA report shows that the practice setting in which a physician delivers care can influence how often they use the technology.
Overall, 71.4% of physicians reported using telehealth in 2024. That figure is far higher than the 25.1% of physicians who used it prior to the COVID-19 public health emergency in 2018, though it is down from the 79% of doctors using telehealth in 2020, according to the AMA Policy Research Perspectives report, “Patient-Facing Telehealth: Use Is Higher Than Pre-Pandemic But With Great Variation Across Physician Specialties” (PDF).
Among the physicians surveyed in 2024, here is how many said their practices used telehealth for these services:
- 52.5%—managed patients with chronic disease.
- 48.5%—diagnosed or treated patients.
- 40.3%—provided care to patients with acute disease.
- 25%—provided preventive care.
However, the ownership of the practice a physician was a part of appeared to have an impact on those numbers.
Physicians in hospital-owned practices were more likely to report using telehealth than physicians who were part of a private practice.
From AI implementation to digital health adoption and EHR usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors. That includes recently launching the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI to give physicians a powerful voice in shaping how AI and other digital tools are harnessed to improve the patient and clinician experience.
Private vs. hospital-owned
Carol Kane, PhD, directs economic and health policy research at the AMA and wrote the report. She found that when it came to using any type of telehealth—including, for example, videoconferencing, audio-only or remote patient monitoring—physicians in private practice were less likely to use the modality compared with physicians in hospital-owned practices: 68.4% versus 79.7%.
The report also shows that physicians in hospital-owned practices in 2024 were more likely to report using videoconferencing than physicians in private practice—73.5% versus 58.3%.
And there was a 7 percentage-point difference between the two groups when it came to using telehealth for patient monitoring—16.9% for private practice physicians versus 24.3% for physicians in hospital-owned practices.
There was a 9 percentage-point difference between primary care physicians in the two ownership groups when it came to videoconferencing use. In hospital-owned practices 78.9% of primary care physicians reported using the technology, compared with 70.1% of those in private practice.
Why some don’t use telehealth
A lack of relevancy to the specialty and a physician preference to treat patients in person were the two most common reasons physicians gave for why their practices were not using videoconferencing or audio-only patient visits.
Overall, 60.6% of physicians whose practices didn’t use videoconferencing reported that it was not relevant to their specialty. Along these lines, anesthesiologists, emergency physicians and radiologists were more likely to report lack of specialty relevance than were primary care physicians.
But when Kane looked only at physicians in practices where videoconferencing and audio-only visits were relevant, she discovered that 60% of physicians said their practice didn’t use telehealth because they preferred to treat patients in person.
25% of physicians said a lack of sufficient payment was why it wasn’t used, while 20.5% said there was a lack of patient interest and 13.4% said implementation costs were prohibitive.
Physicians in private practice were more likely than physicians in hospital-owned practices to name financial reasons as an explanation for not using telehealth, although those were still not the top reasons cited. There was a difference of 5 percentage points between the two groups who said payment was a reason and a difference of 8 percentage points between those who cited implementation costs.
Meanwhile, there was a 12 percentage-point difference between the groups when it came to saying physician preference was a reason why videoconferencing and audio-only visits were not used in their practices, with private practice physicians more likely to cite that reason.
“Both groups strongly said ‘Our practice doesn’t offer videoconference visits because of physician preference,’ but this was much higher for physicians in private practice,” Kane said in an interview.
Hospital-owned practice physicians being less likely to report physician preference as a reason may partially reflect “that they have less input into telehealth decisions made by practice management,” the report says. “It’s not clear that physicians in the two ownership structures ‘think differently’ about the use of telehealth.”
The AMA Policy Research Perspectives report comes at a time when there is little published research examining how frequently physicians use telehealth and how use differs across specialties. Data for the AMA Policy Research Perspectives report comes from the AMA’s nationally representative Physician Practice Benchmark Survey, which the AMA has conducted on a biennial basis since 2012.
Making telehealth pay permanent
Payment and regulatory flexibilities that protect Medicare patients’ access to telehealth services introduced in 2020 as the COVID-19 public health emergency disrupted in-person visits expired on Sept. 30, but they were temporarily extended to Jan. 30 when Congress took action to end the government shutdown in November.
The AMA supports bipartisan, bicameral legislation—The Creating Opportunities Now for Necessary and Effective Care Technologies (CONNECT) for Health Act of 2025, as well as the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2025—that would permanently remove geographical restrictions for telehealth services, allow Medicare patients to have telehealth visits wherever their audio or video connections are available and repeal a requirement from the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 that says Medicare patients must have an in-person visit with a physician within six months of an initial telemental health visit.
Visit AMA Advocacy in Action to find out what’s at stake in supporting telehealth and other advocacy priorities the AMA is actively working on.
