Validation of a patient satisfaction survey of the Teleneurology program in Chile

Abstract

Objective Telemedicine arises as an attractive intervention for reducing the waiting time for appointments with medical specialists in Chile. Successful implementation of this technology requires safeguarding the patient/clinician trust relationship; however, no studies have been conducted to evaluate quality perception of a telemedicine program in Chile. To assess patient satisfaction with the Teleneurology program at the Hospital Higueras Talcahuano (HHT), addressing patient/clinician trust relationship. Results A perception survey was constructed with 23 questions, distributed into 5 key areas (items) of user satisfaction. Its face validity was performed by five neurology specialists from the Teleneurology unit of HHT. The survey was applied to 167 patients of the HHT, recruited between 2018 and 2019, for conducting a pilot cross-sectional descriptive study to assess internal consistency (Cronbach alpha) and reliability (factorial analysis of main components). The survey showed an internal consistency of 0.88. Removing any of the items maintained its reliability in values over 0.8. All items showed point biserial correlations greater than 0.30. Overall, the survey constructed and evaluated in this study showed high internal consistency and reliability values, which will allow its application in further studies of quality assessment of the Teleneurology unit of HHT. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13104-019-4358-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Contribution of a synchronic teleneurology program to decrease the patient number waiting for a first consultation and their waiting time in Chile

“…Taking together with the recent report showing a high satisfaction perception by patients with access to this program [15], results from the present work strongly Regression analysis was performed with the Backward method SE Standard error, df x, OR Odds ratio support the success of the Teleneurology Program at HHT in providing highly-accessible and satisfactory healthcare. Adoption of this type of programs by the Chilean Public Healthcare System would allow a consistent contribution to the country-wide decrease in both the number of patients waiting for a first appointment and the waiting time.…”

“…Patients were also referred by a secondary health center (Mental Health Center, COSAM for the Spanish acronym) Hualpén and the tertiary health centers: HHT, Tomé Hospital, Penco-Lirquén Hospital, with the latter ending its participation in the program in 2018 (Additional file 1). Details of the modality of synchronous care of the Teleneurology consultation and the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the patients included in this study were previously described by Constanzo et al [15].…”

“…The Teleneurology Program was created at the HHT Neurology Unit in March 2015 to help manage the 3084 adult neurological patients waiting for a first consultation. This program operates in synchronous mode, in which patients consult with a general practitioner trained for this purpose at their local health care establishment, in the telepresence of the neurologist specialist through an HDTV videoconference system [15]. This type of system has allowed the remote care of patients derived from primary and secondary local healthcare facilities [16,17] as well as improved the flow of consultations of adult neurological patients, with very high user satisfaction [3,15].…”

Characterization of the Teleneurology Patients at the Hospital Las Higueras de Talcahuano—Chile

“…The Talcahuano Health Service started the teleneurology program in March 2015 to help manage adult neurological patients waiting for their first consultation (9). The program runs in a synchronous mode, in which the ambulatory patient consults a general practitioner, who has been trained for this purpose in a local medical institution and connects the patient with a neurologist at the Hospital Las Higueras de Talcahuano (HHT) via an HDTV video conference system (11). The teleneurology program allows the remote care of patients at local primary and secondary medical institutions and has been shown to improve access to medical care from neurologists, with high levels of user satisfaction (11)(12)(13).…”

“…The program runs in a synchronous mode, in which the ambulatory patient consults a general practitioner, who has been trained for this purpose in a local medical institution and connects the patient with a neurologist at the Hospital Las Higueras de Talcahuano (HHT) via an HDTV video conference system (11). The teleneurology program allows the remote care of patients at local primary and secondary medical institutions and has been shown to improve access to medical care from neurologists, with high levels of user satisfaction (11)(12)(13). Furthermore, the teleneurology program has also produced very good results with regard to reducing the waiting list for a first consultation, providing follow-up visits for patients with adequate control of their condition (9) and maintaining access to services during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic (14)(15)(16).…”