Occupational health professionals’ experiences with telehealth services: usage, perceived usefulness and ease of use

Abstract

Background In occupational health care, telehealth services implementation requires the professionals to change their way of working because they have had to incorporate the telehealth services into their daily routines. Understanding how occupational health professionals relate to and experience telehealth services may aid in its implementation. However, an overview of telehealth services’ use in occupational health care is lacking. The aim of this study was to provide insight into the telehealth services that are used in occupational health care and identify their factors related to occupational health professionals’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Methods The present cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted in May-June 2022 in Finland. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run to test the relationships between demographic variables and the rate of usefulness, and ease of use variables. Scheffe test was used to make comparisons among group means in an analysis of variance (ANOVA) experiment. Results According to the results that investigated the ease of use of telehealth services, the respondents mostly felt that using telehealth services was easy and easy to learn. Profession, work experience, and information and communication technology skills were determinants related to perceived usefulness of telehealth services, while profession and information and communication technology skills were related to perceived ease of use, respectively. Conclusions In this survey, quite a fair agreement was found among occupational health professionals regarding the perceived usefulness and ease of use of telehealth services. However, the study results suggest that occupational telehealth services are most likely to be useful and easy to use when professionals’ information and communication technology skills are at a good level.

The use of digital occupational health services among employer customers: A cross-sectional study

“…Even though digital tools and technology have become more common e.g., in work ability management and occupational co-operation [16,23], our results showed that digital OH services were not yet widely used nor always even available among the employer customers. This came up especially among the subgroup of the entrepreneurs since, depending on the single studied variable, tenth to fifth of the respondents stated that digital tools or digital technology was not available to use.…”

“…Furthermore, the study evaluated the employer customers' experiences of, and the factors associated with, the usefulness and ease of use of digital OH services. Focusing on the HR professionals and entrepreneurs give much needed information about the employer customers' experiences of utilizing digital technologies [11,13,14,16,17]. According to our knowledge, we were the first to conduct a study on digital service experiences of employer customers in OH services.…”

“…The questions were also refined based on the feedback received. It is worth noticing, that this same survey has also been used in studies collecting information on the experiences of OH professionals [16] and employee customers [17] regarding the usefulness and ease of use of OH digital services.…”

“…Previous studies of digital OH services have focused specifically on the experiences of OH professionals [10,[14][15][16] and employee customers [17]. In contrast, the views, and experiences of the use of digital OH services among employer customers have not been previously investigated.…”

Characteristics of Multiprofessional and Client-Oriented Approach in Occupational Health Services: A Cross-Sectional Survey Among Occupational Health Professionals

“…However, it is difficult to assess whether this change has influenced the professionals' responses. On the other hand, it is also known that the number of remote services has also increased in occupational physiotherapists' service offering, 37 and this trend may have an impact on occupational physiotherapists' views on flexible service provision.…”