Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 18, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 18, 2022 - May 13, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 26, 2022
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Virtual care initiatives for older adults in Australia: a scoping review
ABSTRACT
Background:
There has been a rapid shift towards adoption of virtual healthcare services in Australia. It is unknown how widely virtual care has been implemented or evaluated for the care of older adults in Australia.
Objective:
To review literature evaluating virtual care initiatives for older adults across a wide range of health conditions and modalities and identify key challenges and opportunities for wider adoptions at both patient and system levels in Australia.
Methods:
A scoping review of the literature was conducted. Medline, EMBASE, PsycInfo, CINAHL, AgeLine and grey literature (1 January 2011 – 8 March 2021) were searched to identify virtual care initiatives for older Australians (≥65 years of age). Results are reported according to the World Health Organisation digital health evaluation framework.
Results:
Among the 6,201 documents in the search results, we identified 94 documents that reported 80 unique virtual care initiatives. The majority were pilot studies (89%) targeting community-dwelling older adults (81%) with chronic disease (65%). Mode of delivery included videoconference, telephone, apps, device/monitoring systems and web-based technologies. Most initiatives showed either similar or better health and behavioural outcomes compared to in-person care. Key barriers for wider adoption were physical, cognitive, or sensory impairment in older adults; and staffing issues, legislative issues, and a lack of motivation among providers.
Conclusions:
Virtual care is a viable model of care to address a wide range of health conditions in older adults in Australia. More embedded and integrative evaluations are needed to ensure virtually enabled care can be used more widely by older Australians and providers.
Citation
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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.