JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Telehealth interventions are a fundamental shift in the provision of services for healthcare professionals and emerged highly during the COVID-19 pandemic due to contact restrictions and the risk of infections. Video calls are a common method to provide telehealth services, as they have become quite prevalent in personal and professional lives. Still, many barriers exist toward the use of video call-based telehealth.

Objective:

This review aimed to map and condense the perceived barriers of allied health professionals with respect to the use of video call-based telehealth.

Methods:

A comprehensive literature search was carried out in the medical databases Pubmed and Cinahl on June 22, 2022 and updated on January 3, 2023. Original studies, that assessed barriers toward the use of video call-based telehealth, with interviews, focus groups, or questionnaires with occupational therapists, physical therapist, speech and language therapist and/or audiologists, dieticians, midwives, orthoptists, and nurses, were eligible.

Results:

A total of 56 publications were included. Publications were mapped regarding healthcare profession, method, country, target group of the telehealth intervention, sample size, and mentioned barriers. Barriers were assigned to eight categories: Technology issues, practice issues, patient issues, environmental issues, attributions, interpersonal issues, policies & regulations, and administration issues. Furthermore, barriers were divided into 23 subcategories. Lack of hands-on, unreliable network, lack of technology access, diminished fidelity of observations and poor conditions for visual instructions, lack of technology skills, and diminished client-practitioner interaction and communication were most prevalent in the included publications.

Conclusions:

To address those barriers in the future, stable infrastructure, education, training, guidelines, policies, and support systems are needed.