Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 2, 2021
Date Accepted: Nov 22, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Dec 2, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Facilitators and Barriers to the Adoption of Telemedicine During COVID-19
ABSTRACT
Background:
The virulent and unpredictable nature of COVID-19 forced rapid adoption of telemedicine around the world. What were the effects of this rapid adoption? Are barriers the same today after the rapid adoption compared to pre-pandemic conditions?
Objective:
The objective of this systematic literature review were to examine research literature published during the pandemic to identify facilitators, barriers, and associated medical outcomes as a result of adopting telemedicine to determine if shifts have occurred in the industry.
Methods:
Conducting the review in accordance with the Kruse Protocol and reporting the results in accordance with PRISMA, we analyzed 46 research articles from five continents published during the pandemic in four research databases: PubMed (MEDLINE), CINAHL, Science Direct, and Web of Science.
Results:
Reviewers identified 25 facilitator themes and observations, 12 barrier themes and observations, 14 results (compared to the control group) themes and observations. Twenty-two percent reported strongly satisfied or satisfied (zero reported a decline in satisfaction), 27% reported an improvement in administrative or efficiency results (as compared with the control group), 14% reported no statistically significant results from the control group, and 40% and 10% reported an improvement in, or no statistically significant difference in medical outcomes using the telemedicine modality over the control group, respectively.
Conclusions:
The pandemic forced rapid adoption of telemedicine, which also forced practices to adopt the modality regardless of the challenges previous research have identified. Several barriers still exist for health policy makers to address, but healthcare administrators can feel confident in the modality as the evidence shows it is safe, effective, and widely accepted.
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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.