Telemedicine and telehealth initiatives have long been touted as potential avenues for driving down the cost of care and for improving the quality of care for patients who don’t enjoy easy access to hospitals or doctors’ offices — especially elderly Americans who lack reliable transportation.

To date, seniors’ assumed discomfort with healthcare technology was perceived by many industry stakeholders as a barrier to telemedicine’s success.

But providers and payers should assume no more; a new survey of middle-aged and older Americans, jointly conducted by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that 9 in 10 people aged 40 or over are comfortable accessing care via telehealth channels.

Proponents of telemedicine believe that shifts in the public’s comfort level with health IT represent an opportunity to fundamentally improve quality of care. Others note that remote access comes with potentially negative tradeoffs — namely, privacy concerns and patient data security risks.

Get the full story here, from ABC News and the Associated Press.