Medicare Telehealth Trends: Adoption, Equity, and the New Baseline (2020–2025)

This project analyzes Medicare telehealth utilization data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), covering 36,000+ records across all 50 states from January 2020 to December 2025. The central question: did telehealth reach the patients who needed it most equally across race, income, and geography? Using MySQL for data extraction, Python for statistical analysis, and Tableau for visualization, I trace telehealth adoption from its COVID-19 peak of 47.9% in 2020 to its post-pandemic baseline of 23.2% in 2025, and examine the demographic and geographic disparities hiding beneath that national average. Key findings include a persistent 13-percentage-point gap between dual-eligible and Medicare-only patients, a likely rural broadband access crisis reflected in consistently lower adoption rates, and Washington State racial disparities that are invisible in national data. Read the full analysis here.

07 / 30 / 2026