What best describes meta-studies in telehealth research?

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Meta-studies synthesize results from multiple existing studies to determine overall effects and identify patterns across telehealth research. They don’t generate new data or conduct new trials themselves. Instead, they collect effect sizes from published studies, combine them to estimate a single average effect, and can use meta-regression to explore how study characteristics (like population, intervention type, duration, or setting) influence the observed outcomes. This approach helps explain variability between studies and provides a clearer picture of how telehealth tends to work across different contexts.

So, the best description is that these studies reanalyze existing results to extract broader conclusions, rather than conducting new trials, examining individual case reports, or evaluating program budgets. For example, a meta-analysis might pool blood-sugar outcomes from several telehealth diabetes interventions and, with meta-regression, investigate whether longer interventions yield bigger benefits.