JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With over 18.3 million people infected worldwide and over 695,000 deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic has created societal and economic mayhem of unparalleled magnitude. A ray of hope in the midst of this pandemonium is the health care sector innovating with creative solutions to mitigate the pandemic’s impact on human health. Amidst this, a scale-up of telehealth has been just what the doctor ordered.

Objective:

Given the unprecedented scale of the pandemic with no definitive endpoint, we aimed to scope the existing telehealth literature at an interim point (June 2020) to study how researchers have used telehealth for the provision of health care delivery and health professions education since the onset of the pandemic (January 2020).

Methods:

Our scoping review was guided by the Joanna Briggs Institute Reviewer Manual. We systematically searched PubMed and Embase with defined eligibility criteria. Data extracted from the articles included first author and author affiliation; journal of publication; study design; terminologies used to describe telehealth and their accompanying definitions; health discipline/medical specialties and subspecialties in which telehealth had been applied; the purpose of usage; and the overall sentiment on telehealth utility as expressed by the authors. We collated the available information and used descriptive statistics to describe the synthesized data.

Results:

We included 543 articles in our overview, published across 331 different journals. The Journal of Medical Internet Research and its sister journals featured the highest number of articles (n=25; 4.6%). Nearly all, 98.9% (n=537), of the articles were in English. The majority of the articles were opinions, commentaries, and perspectives (n=333; 61.2%). Most of the authors of the articles included in our review were from high—income nations (n=470; 86.6%), especially from the United States of America (n=237; 43.4%). Thirty-nine different definitions were used to describe terms equivalent to telehealth. A small percentage, 7.7%, of the articles reported on the provision of COVID-19 related care. The provision of multiple components of clinical care was the main focus in 270 (49.7%) of the articles, with 23.1% (n=125) articles focused on the specialty of internal medicine and its subspecialties. The sentiment expressed by the authors about telehealth utility in a vast majority of the articles (n=461; 84.9%) was celebratory in nature.

Conclusions:

This paper identifies considerable utilization of telehealth during the current COVID-19 pandemic in health care delivery and health professions education. Much literature is emerging in this area, albeit mostly from high—income countries. There is compelling evidence to suggest that telehealth may have a significant effect in advancing health care in the future. However, the feasibility and utility of telehealth in resource-limited settings and low— and middle—income countries must be established to avail of telehealth’s potential to transform health care for the world’s population. Given the rapidity with which telehealth is advancing, a global consensus on definitions, boundaries, protocols, monitoring, evaluation, and data privacy are all urgently needed.