“Our study showed that the highest level of patient satisfaction within telemedicine visits was actually among patients within the 65 to 79-year-old age range—which has been an age group often seen as resistant to this mode of care,” says Bart Demaerschalk, M.D., a Mayo Clinic neurologist and senior author. “These findings show how important it is that health care organizations don’t exclusively target telemedicine to their younger, more tech-savvy patients.”

Mayo Clinic, November 3, 2022 – In one of the largest studies to date of its kind, Mayo Clinic researchers found patient satisfaction ratings to be equivalent for video telemedicine visits and in-person clinic visits. These findings highlight the potential for the use of telemedicine across a variety of patient populations.

The study, published in the Patient Experience Journal, evaluated patient satisfaction scores from over 300,000 patients treated either in-person or via video telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While researchers found that patient satisfaction ratings were overall equivalent across the two modes of care, they did observe several interesting trends within certain age groups, genders, and races, which countered historical perceptions of telemedicine and represent opportunities for future study.

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