Teleconsultation Between Patients and Health Care Professionals in the Catalan Primary Care Service: Message Annotation Analysis in a Retrospective Cross-Sectional Study.
Background: Over the last decade, telemedicine services have been introduced in the public health care systems of several industrialized countries. In Catalonia, the use of eConsulta, an asynchronous teleconsultation service between primary care professionals and citizens in the public health care s...
| Publicado en: | Journal of Medical Internet Research Vol. 22; no. 9 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
| Formato: | research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
JMIR Publications Inc.
Sep2020
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=146245786&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 146245786 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 14394456 DNC jtl: Journal of Medical Internet Research issn: 14394456 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Sep2020 vid: 22 iid: 9 pid: 21567 pub: JMIR Publications Inc. place: Toronto, Ontario artinfo: ui: 146245786 146245786 NLM32687477 146245786 10.2196/19149 NLM32687477 146245786 ppct: 1 formats: tig: atl: Teleconsultation Between Patients and Health Care Professionals in the Catalan Primary Care Service: Message Annotation Analysis in a Retrospective Cross-Sectional Study. aug: au: Seguí, Francesc López Walsh, Sandra Solans, Oscar Mas, Cristina Adroher Ferraro, Gabriela García-Altés, Anna Cuyàs, Francesc García Carulla, Luis Salvador Castro, Marta Sagarra Vidal-Alaball, Josep López Seguí, Francesc Adroher Mas, Cristina García Cuyàs, Francesc Salvador Carulla, Luis Sagarra Castro, Marta affil: TIC Salut Social, Ministry of Health, Barcelona, Spain sug: subj: Health Care Delivery Methods Pneumonia, Viral Epidemiology Disease Outbreaks COVID-19 Epidemiology Remote Consultation Methods Health Personnel Female Male Retrospective Design Artificial Intelligence Middle Age Primary Health Care Cross Sectional Studies Human Middle Aged: 45-64 years Female Male ab: Background: Over the last decade, telemedicine services have been introduced in the public health care systems of several industrialized countries. In Catalonia, the use of eConsulta, an asynchronous teleconsultation service between primary care professionals and citizens in the public health care system, has already reached 1 million cases. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of eConsulta was growing at a monthly rate of 7%, and the growth has been exponential from March 15, 2020 to the present day. Despite its widespread usage, there is little qualitative evidence describing how this tool is used.Objective: The aim of this study was to annotate a random sample of teleconsultations from eConsulta, and to evaluate the level of agreement between health care professionals with respect to the annotation.Methods: Twenty general practitioners retrospectively annotated a random sample of 5382 cases managed by eConsulta according to three aspects: the type of interaction according to 6 author-proposed categories, whether the practitioners believed a face-to-face visit was avoided, and whether they believed the patient would have requested a face-to-face visit had eConsulta not been available. A total of 1217 cases were classified three times by three different professionals to assess the degree of consensus among them.Results: The general practitioners considered that 79.60% (4284/5382) of the teleconsultations resulted in avoiding a face-to-face visit, and considered that 64.96% (3496/5382) of the time, the patient would have made a face-to-face visit in the absence of a service like eConsulta. The most frequent uses were for management of test results (26.77%, 1433/5354), management of repeat prescriptions (24.30%, 1301/5354), and medical enquiries (14.23%, 762/5354). The degree of agreement among professionals as to the annotations was mixed, with the highest consensus demonstrated for the question "Has the online consultation avoided a face-to-face visit?" (3/3 professionals agreed 67.95% of the time, 827/1217), and the lowest consensus for the type of use of the teleconsultation (3/3 professionals agreed 57.60% of the time, 701/1217).Conclusions: This study shows the ability of eConsulta to reduce the number of face-to-face visits for 55% (79% × 65%) to 79% of cases. In comparison to previous research, these results are slightly more pessimistic, although the rates are still high and in line with administrative data proxies, showing that 84% of patients using teleconsultations do not make an in-person appointment in the following 3 months. With respect to the type of consultation performed, our results are similar to the existing literature, thus providing robust support for eConsulta's usage. The mixed degree of consensus among professionals implies that results derived from artificial intelligence tools such as message classification algorithms should be interpreted in light of these shortcomings. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: research tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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