The Impact of Patient Fees on Demand for Direct-to-Consumer Telemedicine - A Difference-in-Differences Approach

Sammanfattning: This paper analyzes if patients’ demand for Direct-to-Consumer Telemedicine (DCT) providers is affected by a change in patient fees. The paper utilizes a natural experiment when the patient fee increased for patients in Region Stockholm using one DCT provider but remained unchanged for other DCT providers. By using DCT visits per month for all other regions as control, the effect on the demand for other DCT providers is estimated using a Difference-in-Difference model. The result indicates that in the longer run, there is no significant effect on the demand facing other DCT providers that did not experience an increase in the patient fee. Further, the result suggests that the DCT business could have winner-takes-it-all tendencies, but more research is needed to establish this.