An analysis of the protecting access to post-COVID-19 telehealth act and its efficacy in health care access amid the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the barriers and the socio-economic determinants of telehealth services utilization during COVID-19 pandemic. This study measured the association between behavioral health services, medical services, and socio-economic factors such as gender, race, age, income level, education level, and health insurance coverage to determine if there is any relationship between these social economic factors and telehealth access during the COVID-19 pandemic. A descriptive-correlational analysis of secondary data from the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) enabled the researcher to determine associations between social economic factors and healthcare access to answer the research questions and create a baseline to enable follow-up analyses. The independent variables were the socio-economic factors of gender, race, age, income level, education level, and health insurance coverage. The dependent variables were access to health care and telehealth services. Health care was divided into medical and behavioral health services. Levesque's conceptual framework of access to health care is used to synthesize characterizing access to health care and to describe the correlational relationship between the use of telehealth and social economic factors. The results of this study suggests that barriers to medical care were low, with as many as 87% of Louisiana residents having uninterrupted access to services and nearly 27% of residents utilizing telehealth services. The results of this study showed that the social economic factors of gender, race, age, income level, education level, and health insurance coverage were associated with access to health care services and use of telehealth. The regression analyses showed that collectively these social economic factors were significantly associated with health care access and telehealth use in Louisiana during the COVID-19 pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)