Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 9, 2024
Date Accepted: Dec 8, 2024
Telemedicine use during COVID-19: Online cross-sectional surveys of eight countries from the International Sexual Health And REproductive Health (I-SHARE) consortium
ABSTRACT
Background:
Telemedicine is an important way to fill-in the gap of limited access to in-person health care services during challenging times like pandemics.
Objective:
This study aimed to confirm the role that telemedicine played during COVID-19, by multi-country comparison of the usage during and before COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
Data from the I-SHARE project, a multinational online survey conducted between April 2021 and July 2022, were analyzed. This study covered socio-demographics, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and telemedicine use. Descriptive statistics and multilevel modeling were employed to assess the factors influencing the use of telemedicine.
Results:
Overall, 2857 participants were recruited. Prior to COVID-19, 42.4% had used telemedicine. Audio-based services were most commonly used. Multilevel modeling revealed that those who were older (aOR=0.99, 95%CI 0.99, 1.00) and were in countries with a higher GDP per capita (aOR=0.99, 95%CI 0.98, 1.00) were less likely to have ever used telemedicine. Participants who were of male sex assigned at birth (aOR=0.79, 95CI% 0.65, 0.96) were less likely to use telemedicine during the pandemic. Participants who perceived that they were worse off financially were more likely to have switched to telemedicine during COVID-19 (aOR=1.39, 95%CI 1.02, 1.89) and were more likely to report having a poor or fair experience of telemedicine services (aOR=1.75, 95%CI 1.34, 2.29). When sexual orientation was included in the model, non-heterosexual individuals were more likely to ever use telemedicine prior to COVID-19 (aOR=1.35, 95%CI 1.08, 1.69), more likely to have used telemedicine during COVID-19 (aOR=1.58, 95%CI 1.24, 2.02), and more likely to have switched to telemedicine during COVID-19 (aOR=1.55, 95%CI 1.09, 2.21).
Conclusions:
Telemedicine played a key role in addressing healthcare needs during the COVID19 pandemic. Age, gender, economic status and sexual orientation influenced its use. Improving accessibility and user experience is essential to ensure equitable access to healthcare, particularly in the context of SRH services.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.