JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

A well-designed telehealth technology education, integrating information technology and telecommunication into a clinical education program, has great potential to prepare care providers for healthcare delivery across space, time, social, and cultural barriers. It is important to assess how ready care providers are to use telehealth technology and maximize its benefits in the health care delivery process. The focus of this study is therefore to explore care providers’ existing technology use experience and compare their familiarity to the relevant features of telehealth technology.

Objective:

This objective of this study is to explore care providers’ technology use experience across different settings and their perceptions toward telehealth-driven care performance, to lay a foundation for designing more effective nursing education programs. To address this goal, we explore nurse practitioners’ daily use of specific types of health and non-health information technology at work, in education programs, and in their daily lives.

Methods:

The study used quantitative and qualitative analyses. The online survey included four items that measure care providers’ perceptions of care performance when using telehealth technology. Advanced practice registered nurse students (APRNs) rated each of these items on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (“strongly agree”) to 7 (“strongly disagree”). In addition, they responded to three open-ended questions about what kinds of health information technology they used at work, after work, and in their current educational program.

Results:

A total of 109 APRN students responded to the online survey and the open-ended questionnaire. Most of respondents indicated that using telehealth technology can enhance care performance (Mean=5.67, SD=1.36), help make their care tasks more effective (Mean=5.73, SD=1.30), improve the quality of dealing with care tasks (Mean=5.71, SD=1.30), and decrease error rates in communicating and sharing information with others (Mean=5.35, SD=1.53). Additionally, our qualitative analyses revealed that they used electronic health records technology at work, along with clinical decision support tools for medication and treatment management. Outside work, they primarily used video-text communication tools, while they used telehealth technology in their education setting. In addition, they believe that using non-health apps strengthens their use of health information technology for accessing health information, confirming their diagnosis, and ensuring patient safety.

Conclusions:

This research highlights the importance of identifying care providers’ existing technology use experience to better design a nursing education program using telehealth technology. By explicitly focusing on care providers’ existing technology use characteristics in work, non-work, and education settings, we found a possible alignment of care providers’ technology use requirements between practice and in education programs. Health policy makers and health practitioners need to provide compatible telehealth education programs, tailored to the level of care providers’ technological familiarity across their work and non-work environments.