The literature examining direct-to-consumer (DTC) commercial virtual care has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Our objective was to synthesise the nature and range of evidence on DTC commercial virtual care.

Scoping review.

MEDLINE ALL, EMBASE Classic+Embase, CINAHL, HealthSTAR, PsycINFO, CENTRAL and grey literature sources.

We included original research studies published in English or French between 1 January 2016 and 30 April 2025 that assessed DTC commercial virtual care in all contexts and in all populations.

Screening titles and abstracts, and full-text manuscripts, and extracting data was done in duplicate. We analysed quantitative data using descriptive statistics and reported findings in tables. We provided a narrative summary of textual data.

After excluding duplicates, we identified 8055 studies for title and abstract screening; 691 articles for full-text screening; and 103 studies meeting our inclusion criteria. 32 studies (31.1%) reported financial ties to the virtual care industry. 67 (65.0%) studies were conducted in the USA. Studies were largely quantitative (87/103 (84.5%)) or mixed methods (8/103 (7.8%)) studies and used cross-sectional (85/95 (89.5%)) designs. Most quantitative studies were descriptive, reporting on quality of care, health outcomes, platform characteristics and patient views, with only 24 of the 95 quantitative studies (25.3%) including a control or comparison group. 18 of these 24 studies (75.0%) compared the quality of care, costs and/or utilisation to other models of care and reported variable findings. The rest compared patient characteristics. Few studies assessed clinician perspectives or addressed privacy-related ethical concerns.

Despite a large number of studies assessing DTC commercial virtual care, we have little insight into impacts on quality of care, health outcomes, health system utilisation and privacy-related ethical concerns. The financial ties with industry suggest that there may be bias in the body of research literature.