Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Aug 5, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 9, 2018 - Oct 4, 2018
Date Accepted: Mar 4, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Patients and doctors perception on utility of Telemedicine service for maternal and child healthcare in Bangladesh: a qualitative exploratory study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Internationally telemedicine is increasingly being used for remote consultation with healthcare professionals for screening and management. In rural Bangladesh, where there is high demand for scarce male and even scarcer female doctors, remote consultations may provide assistance to women seeking maternal and child health care.
Objective:
The objective of current paper is to understand perception of users and doctors on accessing a tele-counselling service and usefulness of such service in maternal and child healthcare in Bangladesh.
Methods:
We used qualitative phone interviews to explore the perceptions of eight married women and eight married men from 16 families who had accessed a 24 hour telemedicine healthcare service for pregnant women, new mothers and newborns. In addition, we interviewed eleven doctors from the same service who provided phone consultations to subscribers. The telemedicine service provided advice, primary diagnosis, prescription of over- the- counter drugs and referrals to subscriber callers.
Results:
We found that the female study participants were more experienced users of mobile phones and had higher socio-economic status than the women whose husbands called the service. Both men and women valued the service as it allowed them to talk to a doctor at any hour. They reported that the doctors were friendly and they could have unlimited consultation time. The doctors promoted general health awareness, good healthcare practices and facility based care for women and their children. They helped families understand severity of sicknesses and advised them when to seek emergency care. However, doctors reported that diagnosing symptoms without seeing the patient remains a challenge and that the service needs to be integrated with local facilities to assist patients in finding the right care.
Conclusions:
Tele-counselling service is a feasible approach to respond to the need of consultation of trained doctors during medical emergencies. An integrated health system with tele-counselling and referral system is likely to increase access to quality maternal and child healthcare services.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© 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.