JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid shift to telemedicine to minimize patient and provider exposure risks. While telemedicine has been utilized in a variety of primary and specialty care settings for many years, it has been slow to be adopted in oncology care. Health care provider and administrator perspectives on factors affecting telemedicine use in oncology settings are not well understood and the conditions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic offered the opportunity to study the adoption of telemedicine and resulting provider and staff perspectives on its use.

Objective:

To study the factors that influenced telemedicine uptake and sustained use in outpatient oncology clinics at one U.S. cancer center to inform future telemedicine practices.

Methods:

We used purposive sampling to recruit a mix of oncology specialty providers, practice managers, nursing and administrative staff representing five outpatient oncology clinics affiliated with the Dartmouth Cancer Center, a large regional cancer center in the northeast U.S., to participate in semi-structured interviews conducted over six weeks in spring 2021. The interview guide was informed by the five domains of the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, which includes inner and outer setting factors, characteristics of the intervention (i.e., telemedicine modality), individual level factors (e.g., provider and patient characteristics), and implementation processes. Eleven providers, three leaders and six staff participated following verbal consent and thematic saturation was reached across the full sample. We used a mixed deductive and inductive qualitative analysis approach to study the main influences to telemedicine uptake, implementation, and sustainability during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic across the five settings.

Results:

The predominant influencers of telemedicine adoption in this study were individual provider experiences and assumptions about patient preference and accessibility. Providers’ early telemedicine experiences, especially if negative, influenced preferences for telephone over video and affected sustained use. Telemedicine was most favorably viewed for lower-acuity cancer care, visits less dependent on physical exam, and for patient & caregiver education. A lack of clinical champions and leadership guidance and vision hindered the implementation of standardized practices and were cited as essential for telemedicine sustainability. Respondents expressed anxiety about sustaining telemedicine use if reimbursements for telephonic visits diminished or ceased. Opportunities to enhance future efforts included a need to provide additional guidance supporting telemedicine use cases and evidence of effectiveness in oncology care, and to address provider concerns with communication quality.

Conclusions:

In a setting of decentralized care processes, early challenges in telemedicine implementation had an outsized impact on the nature and amount of sustained use. Proactively designed telemedicine care processes with attention to patient needs will be essential to support a sustained role for telemedicine in cancer care.