JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Telemedicine is increasingly being leveraged on, with the need for remote access to healthcare driven by the rise of chronic disease incidence and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also important to understand patients’ willingness to pay (WTP) for telemedicine and the factors contributing towards it as this knowledge may inform health policy planning processes like resource allocation or developing a pricing strategy for telemedicine services. Most of the published literature is focused on cost-effectiveness analysis findings to guide financing from health system’s perspective. However, there is limited exploration of the WTP from a patient’s perspective which is pertinent for sustainability of an intervention.

Objective:

To address this gap, we aimed to conduct a systematic review to describe the WTP for telemedicine interventions and to identify the factors influencing WTP among patients with chronic diseases in developed settings.

Methods:

We systematically searched 4 databases (PubMed, PsycInfo, Embase, EconLit). Two authors were involved in the appraisal. Studies were included if they reported the WTP amounts and/or identified the factors associated with patients’ WTP, included patients above 18 years of age, those diagnosed with chronic diseases and were from developed settings.

Results:

11 studies from 7 countries met the study’s inclusion criteria. The proportion of people willing to pay for telemedicine ranged from 19% to 70% across the studies, while the values for WTP amounts ranged from 0.885 USD to 821.25 USD. We found statistically significant correlation of age and distance to preferred health facility with WTP for telemedicine: while higher age was associated with lower WTP, longer travel distance was associated with higher WTP.

Conclusions:

Based on our findings, the following are recommendations which may enhance WTP: exposure to the telemedicine intervention prior to assessing WTP, lowering of telemedicine costs, and providing patient education to raise awareness on telemedicine’s benefits and address patients’ concerns. Additionally, we recommend future research be directed at standardizing the reporting of WTP studies with adoption of a common metric for WTP amount ,which may facilitate generalization of findings and effect estimates.