Honors Theses
Date of Award
2018
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Mark Van Boening
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
Mississippi has the fewest active physicians per capita of any state, consistently struggles with high rates of acute and chronic illness, and over half of its residents live in rural areas lacking specialty medical care. In an effort to bridge the state's geographical gap in access to healthcare, the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) has introduced telemedicine. This study conducts an analysis of some of the societal benefits of UMMC's telemedicine initiatives using a difference-in-differences identification strategy. This model attempts to obtain the county-level causal effects of implementing telemedicine by evaluating the resulting changes in length of life, quality of life, and other relevant health outcomes. Though this study does not find any statistically significant results, many of the estimates of these changes do indicate movement in the direction of improved county health. This is encouraging given that telemedicine's widespread use is relatively recent and the analysis may be suffering from a low incidence rate. Some of the estimates are also large with large standard errors, indicating that some telemedicine programs may have a great impact though this model is not able to accurately estimate that impact. These results provide hope that as the use of telemedicine continues to expand in the state of Mississippi collection of related data will enable further and more accurate analysis.
Recommended Citation
McLeod, Megan Elise, "The County-Level Impact of Telemedicine: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the University of Mississippi Medical Center's Telemedicine Initiatives" (2018). Honors Theses. 687.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/687
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