Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jan 7, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 17, 2021
Programs Providing Telephone Consultations between Healthcare Providers: An Environmental Scan
ABSTRACT
Background:
Technology, such as video conferencing and store-and-forward systems, allow healthcare providers to easily consult and securely share patient information with other providers. The most basic of these technologies, the telephone, has been used for teleconsultations for decades and is still being used today.
Objective:
As part of a quality assurance study of a physician-to-physician consultation program in Alberta, this environmental scan aimed to identify the characteristics and outcomes of physician-to-physician telephone consultation programs.
Methods:
We searched 7 databases to identify English publications in 2007-2017 describing physician to physician consultations using telephones as the main technology. To identify Canadian programs, the literature search was supplemented with an additional Google search.
Results:
The literature search yielded 2336 citations of which 17 publications were included. 14 telephone consultation programs across 6 countries provided primary care providers with access to various specialist through hotlines, paging system, or call centres. The programs reported on the avoidance of hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and specialty visits, satisfaction of the callers on the telephone consultation, and cost avoidance.
Conclusions:
Telephone consultation programs between healthcare providers have facilitated access to specialist care and prevented acute care use.
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.