Previously submitted to: JMIR mHealth and uHealth (no longer under consideration since Feb 19, 2021)
Date Submitted: Feb 15, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The promise of Telemedicine in Pakistan: A Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Telemedicine is a medical practice of assisting remote patients and it has great potential in developing countries like Pakistan. Telemedicine solves the logistical barriers, deliver good support to weak health systems and unite worldwide networks of healthcare personals. Because of high implementation costs, yet it is not possible to adopt telehealth systems for low and middle-income nations.
Objective:
In this systematic review, we aim to present an update revision of region-based telemedical services in Pakistan.
Methods:
Libraries such as PubMed (Medline), CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Scopus (EMBASE) and Google Scholar were used for document search. Newcastle Ottawa Scale (NOS) is adopted to conduct study quality. Majority of the studies (n-8) included in the review were of high quality as assessed through the Newcastle Ottawa scale. Selected study characteristics further analyzed based on different parameters such as publication year, sample size, study design, methods, motivation and outcomes.
Results:
Search produced 955 articles and 11 items were ultimately selected to conduct the review. These studies further characterized as region-based telemedicine implementation. Out of 11, eight studies were conducted in the urban region and three studies were conducted in the rural areas of Pakistan. Majority of studies produced evidence on telehealth interventions by smartphone services like SMS, apps and web-based telemedicine.
Conclusions:
Telehealth interventions like mHealth, eHealth, telemedicine, and telepharmacy are starting to evaluate for the last two decades but certainly needs to become an integral part of Pakistan's current health infrastructure.
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.