Research into the California - based Kaiser Permanente ’ telehealth system found both high levels of patient satisfaction and positive outcomes . The analysis , conducted on video - based care encounters between 2015 - 2017 , used data from 201,383 recorded video visits from 152,809 patients . Although the length of a consultation was only eight minutes , the study found that 92 percent of respondents said the connected care encounter met their needs . Rather than direct - to - patient telehealth services , the transition was made to a novel model of integrating telemedicine seamlessly with patients ’ ongoing clinicians , EHRs and delivery systems . Over three - quarters of the virtual visits were made for medicine , pediatrics , dermatology , after - hours care or psychiatry , with 70 percent of the primary care visits made with the patient ’s own primary care provider . Some issues , however , were the relatively low success rate of 66 percent when initially connecting for the telehealth visit , though this rose on subsequent visits . Furthermore , the number telehealth visits were a fraction of total encounters , involving less than 5 percent of the health system ’s total patients , amounting to less than 1 percent of all office visits . They reported their results in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. The report concludes that telehealth encounters were well received among patients , but the tool remained underused .
Research into the California - based Kaiser Permanente ’ telehealth system found both high levels of patient satisfaction and positive outcomes . The analysis , conducted on video - based care encounters between 2015 - 2017 , used data from 201,383 recorded video visits from 152,809 patients . Although the length of a consultation was only eight minutes , the study found that 92 percent of respondents said the connected care encounter met their needs . Rather than direct - to - patient telehealth services , the transition was made to a novel model of integrating telemedicine seamlessly with patients ’ ongoing clinicians , EHRs and delivery systems . Over three - quarters of the virtual visits were made for medicine , pediatrics , dermatology , after - hours care or psychiatry , with 70 percent of the primary care visits made with the patient ’s own primary care provider . Some issues , however , were the relatively low success rate of 66 percent when initially connecting for the telehealth visit , though this rose on subsequent visits . Furthermore , the number telehealth visits were a fraction of total encounters , involving less than 5 percent of the health system ’s total patients , amounting to less than 1 percent of all office visits . The report concludes that telehealth encounters were well received among patients , but the tool remained underused .