Teledermatology in German Speaking Countries - Patient's and Physician's Perspectives
ABSTRACT
Background:
With increasing digitalization and the current pandemic, teledermatology has gained importance in German speaking countries in recent years. The regulation on remote consultation methods was recently relaxed, allowing for a more widespread introduction of teledermatological health care services.
Objective:
The aim of this work is to evaluate a store-and-forward (SAF) teledermatology application from the patient and physician perspective.
Methods:
Non-controlled user survey of the online platform derma2go in the course of the remote consultation by German dermatologists. Via the platform, patients with dermatological requests can obtain expert advice within a few hours after entering their medical history and uploading pictures of their skin lesions.
Results:
A total of n= 1476 (t1) and n= 361 (t2) patients and n= 2207 dermatologist-ratings were included within the evaluation. A large proportion of participants was satisfied with the application (t1: 83.9%; t2: 81,2%). Most participants also rated the usability as high (t1: 83.0% satisfied) and were satisfied with the response time of the dermatologists (t1: 92.0% satisfied). In addition, a large majority agreed with the statement that they trusted the application (t1: 90.5%). At t2, 20.0% of those who participated stated that their skin problem had healed, for 49.8% it had already improved, for 22.0% it was unchanged and for 3.5% skin problem had worsened. For 64.0% of users, the request was completely and for 24.2% was partly resolved as result of the consultation. In 79.7% no additional information were needed by participating dermatologists. From the practitioner’s perspective 71.2% of all requests were completely and 24.7% were partly resolved.
Conclusions:
Our evaluation has shown that SAF applications, exemplified by derma2go, are likely to improve access to dermatological care, with a high patient satisfaction and a high rate of resolved requests, from a patient and physician perspective. In the future, the teledermatological store-and-forward application can represent a supplement to the existing routine care in dermatology. The indications, patient groups and use cases, for which the application is particularly suitable, will be determined in further studies.
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.