Examining Individuals' Use of the Internet For Healthcare Activities Over Time: Statistical Analysis of NHIS Data

Telehealth is an increasingly important component of healthcare services. Telehealth services may present an opportunity to increase the equity, accessibility, and effectiveness of healthcare. As such, it is critical that telehealth design focus on reducing the barriers to access and usability that may impair some telehealth users. I utilized data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and multiple logit regression models focused on different aspects of telehealth in order to determine demographic characteristics, behaviors, or opinions which may predict groups that are likely to face a barrier to using telehealth services. This analysis provides an exploratory look at the data in order to highlight barriers that may impact a user’s ability to access telehealth services in the context of other potential predictor variables to account for the real-world variability that these may present. Additionally, this analysis examines three different avenues of telehealth service: looking up health information online, scheduling an appointment online, and communicating with a care provider through email in order to consider the ways in which different telehealth services may face different barriers. The results from this analysis indicate these potential barriers. Future work should focus on exploring the ways and contexts in which these predictor variables might interact with one another. Additionally, future design work should consider the ways in which design efforts might impact these particular groups, as well as how participant selection in design studies considers these groups.