The growing ageing of the population in developed economies has necessitated the progressive use of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the home care of elderly individuals. The effect of these technologies on elderly health outcomes remains an open issue. In this study, we analyze the impact of telecare on the mortality rate of elderly people in Italy using data at the municipal level and a doubly robust difference-in-differences design. Our results show that telecare services significantly reduced the mortality rate of the elderly aged 65 and over by 1.7 individuals per 1,000 inhabitants. This effect was sizeable, since it was a 4% decrease in the elderly mortality rate relatively to the average elderly mortality rate in the treated municipalities. The reduction in the elderly mortality rate was greater in municipalities with a large proportion of childless elderly people, suggesting that telecare may be particularly useful for the elderly who find it more difficult to rely on strong family ties. Moreover, it was stronger in small municipalities, indicating that telecare may be more effective where there is a greater need to compensate for a lower level of traditional social and health care services.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.