JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Telemedicine use surged due to its capacity to deliver safe, remote care. As the public health crisis subsides, evaluating the interplay among various tools, such as video, audio, and text, becomes critical to sustained use. With healthcare shifting back to in-person models, understanding whether telemedicine tools complement or compete provides valuable insights for future technology design and usage strategies.

Objective:

This study investigates whether different types of telemedicine technology tools complement or compete while physicians deliver healthcare services through them. A clear understanding of the relationships between telemedicine technology tools, physicians’ satisfaction, evaluation of care quality, and patient visit percentages is crucial for the design of new telemedicine technology platforms and ensuring quality of care services through technology platforms.

Methods:

To fulfill our objective, we analyzed data from the 2021 National Electronic Health Records Survey (NEHRS). We employed ordered logit and probit regression models to evaluate the effects of telemedicine technology tools on physicians’ overall satisfaction, quality of healthcare evaluation, and the percentage of patient visits via telemedicine.

Results:

A total of 1,875 office-based physicians completed questionnaires were collected in the United States. Three main outcomes were assessed, including physician satisfaction (n = 1,614), evaluation of healthcare quality (n = 1,617), and the percentage of patient visits conducted via telemedicine (n = 1,558), respectively. Ordered logit and probit regression analyses revealed that the aggravated use of telemedicine tools has a significant impact on improvements in all three outcomes. A unit increase in telemedicine tools was associated with an increase of 4.2 percentage points in the predicted probability of physicians being “very satisfied” (p < 0.001), and a 5.2 percentage point increase in evaluating telemedicine quality as “to a great extent” (p < 0.001). For patient visits, a unit increase in telemedicine tools was associated with a 1.8 percentage point increase in the likelihood of reporting “≥75% of visits via telemedicine” (p < 0.001). Disaggregated analysis indicated that all individual tools were positively associated with physician satisfaction and quality evaluation (p < 0.05).

Conclusions:

Our study demonstrates that telemedicine technology tools complement each other by playing distinct roles in patient care while satisfying different task requirements of ambulatory care physicians. Different combinations of telemedicine technology tools maximize service effectiveness by leveraging multiple communication channels, such as audio, video, and platforms associated with electronic health records. This allows physicians to tailor their telemedicine technology tools to be used according to specific consultation needs, ultimately enhancing the overall access and quality of healthcare delivery.