GPs in established practices who make heavier use of telehealth prescribe fewer antibiotics and stick closer to guidelines than others, Australian research suggests.

The mass shift to telehealth in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — described as 10 years of reform done in 10 days — has been an unplanned natural experiment on how GPs would change up their practices when given the chance to consult remotely.

Writing in the Journal of Health Economics last month, researchers led by the University of Technology Sydney said that US and Finnish studies had linked telehealth to overprescribing, including heavier antibiotic use for respiratory tract infections in the US.

Their study compared GPs who performed an above-average number of telehealth consultations with so-called “low-intensity telemedicine adopters” in the same area, using Medicare and PBS data from 2017 to 2022, covering 36,669 GPs.