Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 8, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 8, 2020 - Jun 16, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 9, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 30, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
COVID19: Interesting times for teleconsultations
ABSTRACT
The social distancing measures that have been adopted worldwide because of COVID-19 will probably remain in place for a long time, especially for senior adults, people with chronic conditions and other risk populations. Tele-consultations can be useful to ensure that patients continue to receive clinical care while reducing physical crowding, and avoiding unnecessary exposure of healthcare staff. All thanks to web-conferencing software, an empty room and the right devices. Adoption rates that would typically take months of planning, budgeting, pilot testing, and education are now compressed into days. However, in the urgency to deal with this situation, we may be forgetting that the introduction of digital health is not exclusively a technological issue, but part of a complex organizational change problem. This viewpoint offers insight regarding issues that rapidly adopted tele consultation systems may face in a post-COVID19 world.
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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.