Identifying Patterns of Primary Care In-Person and Telemedicine Use in the Veterans Health Administration: A Latent Class Analysis

The Veterans Health Administration increased synchronous telemedicine (video and telephone visits) in primary care in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our objective was to determine veteran use patterns of in-person and telemedicine primary care when all modalities were available. A retrospective cohort analysis. We performed a latent class analysis of primary care visits over a 1-year period to identify veteran subgroup (i.e., class) membership based on amount of primary care use and modality used. Then, we used multinomial logistic regression with a categorical outcome to identify patient characteristics associated with class identification. A random national sample consisting of 564,580 primary care empaneled veterans in June 2021. Latent class membership. We identified three latent classes: those with few primary care visits that were predominantly telephone-based (45