ABSTRACT
Delivering care through telehealth has been a subject of concern for the healthcare industry for a long time. Its use is debatable for many in the industry because of varying reasons. However, the COVID-19 pandemic caused an enormous growth in adopting telehealth to provide care to patients. This has proved to be of a substantial benefit for patients and healthcare providers as a result of which improving its use became an area of interest for many. This paper focuses on identifying and analyzing the barriers for the healthcare industry to incorporate virtual visits/consulting on an integral level, with a goal of delivering high quality of care. These barriers have been identified from different angles and have been grouped into six categories of people (patients and physicians), organization, tasks, tools and technology, internal environment, and external environment, which are the work systems of the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) framework. Moreover, we have considered the interaction between those work systems. We have been able to access a survey of more than 2,850 patients and caregivers by Rare Patient Voice for the identification of more barriers and facilitators of implementing telehealth (virtual consulting specifically) or the confirmation of previously identified factors. Some physicians have also been consulted to verify our identified barriers and research findings. We have also provided recommendations to address some of those barriers. This analysis and the provided recommendations are an attempt to overcome the hindrances of virtual consulting and establish it at a more integral level. Copyright, American Society for Engineering Management, 2022.
ABSTRACT
Digital health has been a developing area of healthcare delivery in recent years and the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated its expansion. One of the significant aspects of digital health is the quality of care that patients receive virtually and the impact of technology on patient safety. However, addressing patient safety in virtual, or digitally delivered, care is not yet commensurate with the rapid growth of digital health driven by COVID-19. In this study, we consider Digital Health as not a distinct modality of care, but rather as a tool to bridge gaps in existing care delivery systems. We first discuss the interoperability between and across Digital Health systems and then discuss the application of High Reliability Organizations (HRO) principles as a mechanism to reinforce weak interconnections to achieve systems interoperability and integration. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.