The Mitigating Effects of Telehealth Uptake on Disparities in Maternal Care Access, Quality, Outcomes, and Expenditures, United States, 2020

This study explores whether perinatal telehealth uptake has mitigated the pandemic's effects on disparities in maternal care access, quality, and outcomes by race, ethnicity, and rural or urban residence. To date, research has utilized census data to assess whether community-wide broadband infrastructure exists to support the use of telehealth services in areas with high travel times to maternal care units. Findings suggest that socioeconomically disadvantaged communities face significant barriers to maternity care access, both with substantial travel burdens and inadequate digital access to facilitate telehealth services. Future research will incorporate electronic health records from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), hospital-based claims data, and vital statistics from Florida and South Carolina to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal care and birth outcomes by race, ethnicity, and urbanicity. The study also aims to assess how state-level telehealth policies relate to perinatal telehealth uptake by race, ethnicity, and urbanicity, and to develop a model to predict long-term changes in maternal care access, quality, outcomes, and expenditures, with and without state telehealth policies.
The ICPSR provides variable-level metadata for the data associated with this study. The actual data may only be available from the Principal Investigator directly. The variable descriptions available through ICPSR also include information regarding the source of each variable listed, as does the Data Source field of these metadata.