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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Yearb Med Inform 2022; 31(01): 060-066
DOI: 10.1055/s-0042-1742500
Special Section: Inclusive Digital Health
Working Group Contributions

Telehealth as a Means of Enabling Health Equity

Craig Kuziemsky
1   MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
,
Inga Hunter
2   Massey University, New Zealand
,
Jai Ganesh Udayasankaran
3   Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, India
,
Prasad Ranatunga
4   Provincial Department of Health Services - North-Western Province - Sri Lanka
,
Gumindu Kulatunga
5   Health Information Unit, Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka
,
Sheila John
6   Sankara Nethralaya, Chennai, India
,
Oommen John
7   George Institute for Global Health, UNSW, New Delhi, India
,
José F. Flórez-Arango
8   Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, CUNY Graduate School of Public Health, New York, NY, United States
,
Marcia Ito
9   Professional Master's Program in Productive Systems, Centro Estadual de Educação Tecnológica Paula Souza, São Paulo, Brazil
,
Kendall Ho
10   Department of Emergency Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
,
Shahi B. Gogia
11   Society for Administration of Telemedicine and Healthcare Informatics (SATHI), New Delhi, India
,
Kleber Araujo
12   NUTES - Núcleo de Telessaúde, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
,
Vije Kumar Rajput
13   Keele University, Staffordshire, UK
,
Wouter J. Meijer
14   Quality Assurance eHealth, Netherlands
,
Arindam Basu
15   School of Health Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
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Summary

Objective: The goal of this paper is to provide a consensus review on telehealth delivery prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a set of recommendations for designing telehealth services and tools that contribute to system resilience and equitable health.

Methods: The IMIA-Telehealth Working Group (WG) members conducted a two-step approach to understand the role of telehealth in enabling global health equity. We first conducted a consensus review on the topic followed by a modified Delphi process to respond to four questions related to the role telehealth can play in developing a resilient and equitable health system.

Results: Fifteen WG members from eight countries participated in the Delphi process to share their views. The experts agreed that while telehealth services before and during COVID-19 pandemic have enhanced the delivery of and access to healthcare services, they were also concerned that global telehealth delivery has not been equal for everyone. The group came to a consensus that health system concepts including technology, financing, access to medical supplies and equipment, and governance capacity can all impact the delivery of telehealth services.

Conclusion: Telehealth played a significant role in delivering healthcare services during the pandemic. However, telehealth delivery has also led to unintended consequences (UICs) including inequity issues and an increase in the digital divide. Telehealth practitioners, professionals and system designers therefore need to purposely design for equity as part of achieving broader health system goals.

Keywords

Telehealth - equity - resilience - health systems - unintended consequences


Publication History

Article published online:
02 June 2022

© 2022. IMIA and Thieme. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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