Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 31, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 1, 2019 - Feb 26, 2019
Date Accepted: Nov 29, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The effect of telemedicine adoption in the management of alcohol abuse, addiction, and rehabilitation-A systematic review
ABSTRACT
Background:
More than 18 million Americans are currently suffering from an alcohol use disorder (AUD). With alcohol-related injuries being one of the leading causes of preventable deaths there is a dire need to find ways to assist those suffering from alcohol dependence. There still exists a gap in knowledge as to the potential of telemedicine in improving health outcomes for those patients suffering from an AUD.
Objective:
The purpose of this systematic review is to evaluate the measures of effectiveness that result from the utilization of telemedicine in the management of alcohol abuse, addiction and rehabilitation.
Methods:
This review was conducted utilizing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The articles used in this analysis were gathered using keywords inclusive of both “telemedicine” and “alcohol abuse” which were then searched in the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Cochrane, and Medline (PubMed) databases. A total of 22 articles were chosen for their relation to the objective statement for analysis.
Results:
The results were indicative of telemedicine’s improvement in the reduction of alcohol consumption (16 of 22, 46%) and ability to increase cognition (6 of 22, 17%). Other common outcomes included reduced depression (4 of 22, 11%) and increased patient satisfaction (3 of 22, 9%).
Conclusions:
Telemedicine was found to be an effective tool in reducing alcohol consumption and increasing patients’ accessibility to healthcare services and/or health providers. The group of articles for analysis suggested that telemedicine may be effective in reducing healthcare costs and increasing security and privacy between the patient and provider. Although telemedicine shows promise as an effective way to manage alcohol related disorders, it should be further investigated before implementation. Clinical Trial: none
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.