Telemedicine Adoption and Low-Value Care Use and Spending Among Fee-for-Service Medicare Beneficiaries

Low-value care is a persistent problem with direct and cascading harms. Telemedicine is now commonly used and may reduce low-value testing by introducing barriers to completing tests at a given visit or expand opportunities for low-value testing by contributing to higher visit volumes.In this cohort study using 100% fee-for-service Medicare claims data, US health systems were divided into quartiles based on 2020 telemedicine adoption. Beneficiary-level linear regression in difference-in-differences (DiD) analyses was used to compare beneficiaries who were continuously enrolled from 2019 through 2022 and were attributed before telemedicine adoption (2019) to high telemedicine–adopting (top quartile) vs low telemedicine–adopting (bottom quartile) health systems on low-value test and visit outcomes in 2022 vs 2019. Data were analyzed from October 2023 to December 2024.