Currently accepted at: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jan 19, 2026
Date Accepted: Oct 6, 2026
This paper has been accepted and is currently in production.
It will appear shortly on 10.2196/91748
The final accepted version (not copyedited yet) is in this tab.
Learning Objectives for a Telemedicine Curriculum in Medical Education: Group Concept Mapping Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The implementation of telemedicine in the healthcare sector is ongoing and has now surpassed the levels seen during the 2021 coronavirus pandemic. However, there is currently no consensus in the field of medical education on which specific learning objectives and content should be included in targeted telemedicine training programs and curricula.
Objective:
The present study aims to address the following questions: What are potential learning objectives for a telemedicine curriculum in medical education? Which thematic fields can these learning objectives be grouped into? How do experts rate the importance and implementation effort levels of each learning objective?
Methods:
An online Group Concept Mapping (GCM) tool was used to organize a collective brainstorming session within an expert group and to group and rate the evoked ideas. 97 clinicians, technical experts, and educationalists working with telemedicine were invited to participate in the study. Data acquisition took place from October 2022 to March 2023. Data collection and analysis were performed using the groupwisdom™ software (Concept Systems Inc., NY, USA).
Results:
47 final statements were identified after the initial brainstorming phase. The analysis of the subsequently collected sorting data resulted in a two-dimensional concept map with a stress value (SV) of 0.242 after 20 iterations. Six clusters were identified based on the covered thematic fields: ‘Fundamentals of telemedicine’, ‘Implementation of telemedicine’, ‘Legal principles’, ‘Communication in telemedicine’, ‘Practical use of the technology’ and ‘Technical Knowledge’. We observed a significant negative correlation between importance and implementation effort ratings for the statements (r = -.57; p < .001), which was also reflected on the cluster level.
Conclusions:
The results strongly suggest that a telemedicine curriculum should especially focus on practical competencies and training, as well as on legal issues, because these learning objectives were considered by the experts to be the most important and easiest to implement.
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