Patient experience with telehealth service in a mental health setting.
Heeyoung Lee, Joshua Palmer, Prabir Mullick and 1 others
PMID 37032009WHAT IT FOUND
Mental health patients who used telehealth rated it easy and useful, mostly on smartphones, and 61% said they would attend more often.
Yet 55.1% preferred in-person care, matching 55.1% who preferred telehealth.
Key findings
01Forty-nine patients responded; 61% said they would go to the doctor more often with telehealth and 47% said they would get better.
02Smartphones were the most used telehealth device (63.3%) and the preferred device (57.1%).
03Telehealth usability averaged 5.82 on a 1 to 7 scale, with reliability lowest at 5.21 and ease of use highest at 6.06.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample was small (49 patients) and came from one urban clinic, so results may not generalise. Participants were patients who had already used telehealth and were likely familiar with it, so the survey may not represent people who could not access or use telehealth. The survey did not report telehealth experience by patient characteristics such as age, diagnosis, or education. It was a self-report survey without a comparison group or clinical outcome measurement.
Declared interests
The authors received no financial support and report no actual or potential conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that telehealth improves mental health outcomes. This survey asked 49 patients who had already used telehealth to report perceptions and preferences, and it did not compare telehealth with in-person care or measure clinical results.