Publication date: Aug 06, 2026
IntroductionAccessing specialty cardiac care presents challenges for U. S. individuals with congenital heart defects (CHD), despite recommendations for regular cardiac follow-up. Additionally, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and telehealth expansion on CHD-related health care is not well-understood. Therefore, our objective was to evaluate changes in CHD-related telehealth and other outpatient utilization in the Medicaid population from 2018 to 2022 and a privately-insured population from 2018 to 2023. MethodsUsing claims from national Medicaid (2018-2022) and private insurance (2018-2023) databases, we calculated the number of CHD-related outpatient encounters per 100,000 enrolled children or adults and the number conducted via telehealth. We compared CHD-related outpatient utilization trends before and after the COVID-19 interruption (identified as March-May 2020) as an interrupted times series with Poisson regression. ResultsAmong adults and children in both insured populations, CHD-related outpatient utilization increased before the COVID-19 interruption (January 2018-February 2020); afterward, it decreased in Medicaid but continued increasing at a slower rate among the privately-insured (all P
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Congenital heart defects | |
| COVID-19 pandemic | |
| outpatient healthcare utilization | |
| telehealth |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | Congenital heart defect |
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 pandemic |