Digital divide and health professional shortages: telehealth access for chronic disease management in rural Florida.

Publication date: Jul 21, 2025

This study examines telehealth utilization among Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries with chronic diseases in geographically vulnerable areas of Florida during COVID-19. Using a retrospective design, we retrieved visit-level data from a State of Florida Medicaid and Medicare Managed Care Organization from 2019 and 2020; we included 54,927 unique patients. We aggregated telehealth use at the county level and calculated the percentage of patients who used video telehealth in each county during the study period. We used data from the Digital Divide Index (DDI), Health Professional Shortage Area Designations (HPSA), and Florida Health Outcome Rankings to investigate the intersectionality of rurality, digital divide, health professional shortage, health outcome, and telehealth utilization during the pandemic. T-test and regression analyses were used to examine the study objectives. Our results suggested that telehealth visits in non-metro counties were higher than in metro counties before the pandemic (2. 84 % vs. 0. 61 %, p

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