Why Patients Are Choosing Telehealth Over Your Clinic (And What to Do About It)

Telehealth’s pandemic-era surge has settled into something more durable and harder to dismiss: a real, ongoing preference among a meaningful share of patients for virtual care over an in-person visit, at least for certain needs. For clinics that haven’t built a virtual care option, this isn’t a distant trend to watch — it’s a present-day reason some patients are choosing a competitor instead. This article looks at what the current data actually shows about patient preference, why it’s happening, and what a clinic can realistically do about it without abandoning in-person care.

What the Data Actually Shows

Patient preference for telehealth has grown well past a niche behavior. Research from Harmony Healthcare IT found that 53% of Americans now favor telehealth over conventional in-person doctor visits, with a clear generational pattern — Gen Z leads at 60% preference, followed closely by Millennials. A separate KeyCare consumer survey found the preference is especially pronounced for certain visit types: almost 75% of patients expressed a preference for telehealth (or whichever option was available first) for minor but urgent issues like a cough, sinusitis, or rash, and over 63% preferred telehealth or first-available care even for preventive, specialty, and chronic care visits.

Usage figures back up the preference data. As of early 2025, approximately 54% of Americans reported having used telehealth within the past year, and market projections from ScienceSoft suggest telehealth could represent 25–30% of all U.S. medical visits by the end of 2026, assuming continued regulatory support. It’s worth noting this growth hasn’t been perfectly linear — more recent Epic research analyzing 411 million primary care visits found telehealth’s share of primary care bookings has actually stabilized at around 6–7% since mid-2023, suggesting a “steady state” in many primary care settings even as broader consumer preference and specialty-specific usage (particularly mental health and direct-to-consumer platforms) remain considerably higher.

Why Patients Are Choosing It

The reasons patients cite are consistent across multiple studies, and most trace back to friction in the traditional in-person experience rather than any inherent superiority of virtual care.

• Convenience and time savings: avoiding travel, parking, and time off work for visits that don’t clinically require a physical exam.
• Faster access: telehealth is frequently the first available option when an in-person appointment would mean a longer wait, and for many patients, getting seen quickly matters more than the format of the visit.
• Reduced exposure and comfort: particularly for patients managing chronic conditions or anxiety around clinical settings, a virtual visit removes some of the friction associated with an in-person environment.
• Fewer missed appointments: telemedicine appointments have been shown in retrospective research to be more likely to be completed than in-person appointments, since much of the friction that causes no-shows (travel time, traffic, taking time off work) is removed.

At the same time, patient loyalty to their own provider remains a meaningful factor working in favor of established clinics: over half of telehealth patients (54%) say they only feel comfortable receiving remote care from their own personal doctor, and 67% of Americans still say they prefer working with a doctor over self-diagnosing symptoms. This suggests the competitive threat isn’t necessarily that patients want a stranger over a screen instead of their own doctor — it’s that patients increasingly expect their own doctor, or practice, to offer a virtual option, and will go elsewhere if that option doesn’t exist.

This Isn’t All Bad News for Clinics

It’s worth reframing the competitive dynamic here: telehealth is not exclusively something patients are choosing instead of your clinic — for many practices, it’s a capability patients want from your clinic, and its absence is what pushes them toward a telehealth-only competitor instead. Framed this way, the fix isn’t necessarily to compete against telehealth, but to offer it as part of the practice’s own care model.

There’s also a meaningful clinical case for this beyond competitive pressure. Large-scale research from Epic covering over 35 million records found that for most telehealth visits across 33 specialties studied, there was no need for an in-person follow-up visit within 90 days — indicating that a substantial share of visits currently requiring an in-person appointment could be appropriately and safely handled virtually without compromising care quality.

What Clinics Can Realistically Do

1. Identify Which Visit Types Are Genuinely Telehealth-Appropriate

Not every visit belongs on video, and treating telehealth as a wholesale replacement for in-person care risks both clinical quality and patient trust. Medication management, follow-up visits, minor acute concerns, results discussions, and many chronic disease check-ins are commonly cited as strong candidates, while visits requiring a physical exam, new complex diagnoses, or hands-on procedures generally are not.

2. Build a Hybrid Model, Not an All-or-Nothing Shift

Industry data suggests hybrid care — a blend of virtual and in-person visits within the same practice relationship — is increasingly the model patients and providers alike prefer, with one industry report finding over 80% of patients and providers favoring hybrid setups for the flexibility and improved access they offer. This also addresses a common physician concern: about a quarter of physicians in one survey said they still prefer seeing more patients face-to-face, and a hybrid model lets clinical judgment, not a blanket policy, determine which visits happen virtually.

3. Make Sure Patients Actually Know the Option Exists

A recurring finding in patient surveys is that many patients want more telehealth but simply don’t know it’s available at their existing provider — over half of respondents in one survey were unsure whether their health system offered on-demand telehealth for minor issues. If a clinic already offers virtual visits, promoting that clearly (on the website, at booking, in appointment confirmations) may capture patients who would otherwise assume they need to look elsewhere.

4. Choose HIPAA-Compliant, Purpose-Built Platforms

Telehealth platforms need to meet the same privacy and security standards as any other patient-facing system handling protected health information — encryption, access controls, and audit trails are standard requirements, not optional extras. Healthcare-specific versions of common platforms, or dedicated telehealth vendors built for compliance, are generally a safer foundation than adapting a consumer video tool not designed for clinical use.

5. Train Staff and Providers on the Format, Not Just the Technology

Delivering care effectively over video is a distinct skill from delivering it in person — managing the visit flow, reading non-verbal cues through a screen, and knowing when a virtual visit needs to be escalated to in-person all benefit from explicit training rather than being assumed to transfer automatically from in-person experience.

6. Watch for Overreliance in Either Direction

Physicians in industry surveys have raised genuine concerns about both patient and provider overdependence on virtual visits — the risk of missing symptoms that would be caught in person, or telehealth being used as a substitute for care that genuinely needs a physical exam. A hybrid model works best when clinical judgment, not convenience alone, determines the format for each visit.

Where the Regulatory Picture Stands

Telehealth reimbursement and access rules have shifted repeatedly in recent years and remain an area of ongoing change. As of early 2025, nearly half of U.S. states had implemented payment parity policies ensuring telehealth is reimbursed at the same rate as in-person visits, though federal flexibilities extended during the pandemic have required repeated Congressional extension rather than being made permanent, creating some ongoing uncertainty for practices planning around telehealth as a durable revenue stream. Because these policies can change, it’s worth checking current federal and state requirements before building a telehealth program’s financial model around assumptions that may shift.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is telehealth actually as clinically effective as in-person care?

For many visit types, evidence supports comparable outcomes — large-scale research has found many telehealth visits don’t require an in-person follow-up within 90 days. However, effectiveness depends heavily on matching the visit type to the format; conditions requiring a physical exam or hands-on assessment are not well suited to virtual-only care.

Will offering telehealth cannibalize our in-person visit revenue?

Evidence suggests the opposite risk is often larger: patients who want a telehealth option and don’t have one at their existing provider are more likely to seek it from a competitor or direct-to-consumer telehealth company entirely, representing a bigger revenue loss than a patient simply choosing a virtual visit within the same practice.

What visit types are the safest starting point for a new telehealth program?

Medication management, routine follow-ups, and results discussions are commonly cited as strong starting points, since they typically don’t require a physical exam and carry lower clinical risk if something is missed compared to new or complex presentations.

Do smaller, independent practices need dedicated telehealth software, or can they use general video tools?

Healthcare-specific platforms or healthcare versions of mainstream video tools are strongly preferable, since general-purpose consumer video software is generally not built to meet HIPAA compliance requirements around encryption, access controls, and audit trails.

How do we know if a patient should be routed to telehealth versus an in-person visit?

This is best handled through a documented clinical screening process at scheduling — assessing whether the visit reason requires a physical exam, is a new complex concern, or otherwise needs to be seen in person — rather than leaving the choice entirely to patient preference.

Research Sources

1. Harmony Healthcare IT — Telehealth Statistics: The Rise of Remote Healthcare and Fast Prescriptions — https://www.harmonyhit.com/telehealth-statistics-infographic/
2. KeyCare — Patients Prefer Telehealth Over In-office Visits for Urgent, Preventive, and Specialty Care — https://connectwithcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Survey_-Patients-Prefer-Telehealth-Over-In-office-Visits-for-Urgent-Preventive-and-Specialty-Care.pdf
3. Medical Economics — 30% of All U.S. Medical Care Could Be Virtual by 2026 — https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/30-of-all-u-s-medical-care-could-be-virtual-by-2026
4. EMARKETER — Telehealth Use Stabilizes, Pressuring Brands and Providers to Stand Out — https://www.emarketer.com/content/telehealth-use-stabilizes–pressuring-brands-providers-stand
5. American Hospital Association — Fact Sheet: Telehealth — https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2025-02-07-fact-sheet-telehealth
6. Sermo — Telehealth in 2026: Key Insights for Physicians — https://www.sermo.com/resources/telehealth-key-insights-for-physicians/

Disclaimer

This article is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute clinical, legal, or regulatory advice. Telehealth reimbursement rules and licensing requirements vary by state and change frequently; practices should verify current federal and state regulations before establishing or expanding a telehealth program.