Survey on the status of teledermatology in Austria

Abstract

SummaryBackgroundThe use of digital communication media is becoming increasingly important, with the primary aim of improving both treatment quality and patients' quality of life. In an effort to optimize telemedicine in the field of dermatology, we conducted a survey among dermatologists in Austria.MethodsStatistical analysis of a questionnaire that was developed by a working group and sent to 769 Austrian dermatologists.ResultsOverall, 243 dermatologists (132 women/111 men) participated in the survey. Forty‐seven percent of male respondents and 55 % of female respondents had already received requests for teledermatology consultations. Seventy‐three percent felt that telemedicine was able to contribute to relieving the economic burden on the health care system. Telecommunication between dermatologists and experts (in a given field of dermatology) was deemed to be particularly useful. While telemedicine was also considered to be appropriate for patient follow‐up, it was viewed to be less useful for initial consultations. Roughly 50 % of respondents used telemedicine to get a second opinion; one‐third used it for initial consultations.ConclusionsOur survey shows that the majority of participants consider teledermatology to be a useful supplement to the current practice of dermatology. Given its particular usefulness for triage purposes, teledermatology can help reduce the number of trips to the hospital and subsequent waiting times. This in turn leads to cost reduction and saves time for both patients and doctors. Legal regulations that include provisions for appropriate reimbursement of physicians would make using teledermatology more attractive.

A Framework-Driven Systematic Review of the Barriers and Facilitators to Teledermatology Implementation

“…Patients, primary care providers, and dermatologists raised concerns and reported challenges about obtaining reimbursement for teledermatology consultations [ 3 , 37 , 43 – 45 , 47 , 54 , 56 , 62 ]. Lastly, primary care providers and dermatologists reported concerns with liability and privacy issues (e.g., data security) associated with teledermatology [ 43 , 45 , 47 , 52 , 54 , 55 ]. In contrast, only 3 studies (13%) reported facilitators within this domain, making this domain the least commonly reported facilitator to teledermatology implementation.…”

“…Questionnaires (20 studies, 67% of included studies) and interviews (9 studies, 30% of included studies) were the most common methods of data collection. Only three of the thirty studies used a theoretical implementation framework to guide their investigation [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60]. Each of the three studies used the technology acceptance model, a model designed to assess individuals' level of acceptance of technology (i.e., teledermatology).…”

“…There were three major barriers identified within this domain. First, teledermatology consultation was not able to meet some patients' needs, particularly for certain skin conditions (e.g., allergic disorders) and management procedures (e.g., corticosteroid injection) [43,44,54,60]. Also, patients who did not want to be photographed were unable to pursue store-and-forward teledermatology consultation [41,45,46].…”

Views and experiences of dermatologists in Turkey about teledermatology during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…In a survey conducted in Australia with dermatologists, it was found that the participants thought teledermatology was suitable for use mainly for exchanging views between colleagues and for patient follow‐up and that it could not replace the first consultation 11 …”

Implementation of Teledermatology: Theory and Practice

“…Because a common motivation for implementing teledermatology is to improve patient access to expert dermatologic care, access has components of both reach and effectiveness and it is often difficult to separate these two types of outcomes. While effectiveness includes patient and provider satisfaction [44][45][46], for our purposes, effectiveness is the ability of an intervention to change patient-centric outcomes such as reductions in distance traveled by patients, consult completion times, and improvements in actual and intermediate surrogate measures of patient health outcomes. We also discuss cost-effectiveness, which can affect not only patients but also healthcare organizations and payors.…”