A review of questionnaires used for the assessment of telemedicine

Introduction Telemedicine is the exchange of medical information from one site to another via electronic communications with the goal of improving a patient's clinical health status. Prior studies have identified the absence of a standardized assessment tool for evaluating telemedicine encounte...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of telemedicine and telecare 2024-12, Vol.30 (10), p.1636-1666
Main Authors: Agbali, Raphael A, Balas, E Andrew, Beltrame, Francesco, Heboyan, Vahe, De Leo, Gianluca
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Humans
Multiple choice
Questionnaires
Surveys and Questionnaires - standards
Telemedicine
Telemedicine - standards
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Introduction Telemedicine is the exchange of medical information from one site to another via electronic communications with the goal of improving a patient's clinical health status. Prior studies have identified the absence of a standardized assessment tool for evaluating telemedicine encounters. This study aims to collect and to analyze questionnaires used for the assessment of audiovisual telemedicine encounters from a patient perspective and aims to identify reasons driving the use of self-developed questionnaires. Methods We conducted a systematic search in PubMed for studies that used survey questionnaires to assess synchronous audiovisual telemedicine encounters from 2016 to 2021. We categorized questionnaires used into validated and non-validated types, and for each of them, collected questions, response format, author, year, specialty, and country of publication. Results and Discussion We analyzed a total of 71 articles. We found that only 16 studies used three validated questionnaires. The remaining 55 studies used non-validated questionnaires. Non-validated questionnaires had a high variability in length and used Likert scales, binary responses, multiple choice, and open-ended answers. We found only eight studies in which the authors gave a reason for resorting to designing their own questionnaires. This review reveals insufficient standardized survey questionnaires to be used for the assessment of audiovisual telemedicine encounters. Future research initiatives should focus on developing a standardized and validated instrument well accepted by researchers.
ISSN:1357-633X
1758-1109
1758-1109
DOI:10.1177/1357633X231166161