BackgroundWhile the non-communicable disease (NCD) burden in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) has surged over the past decades, the costs and return on investment (ROI) of implementing cost-effective, WHO-recommended NCD interventions have not been established.MethodsWe performed an economic analysis to estimate the ROI from scaling up four sets of NCD interventions over 15 years. We estimated the direct costs of the four main NCDs (cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and chronic respiratory diseases) using a prevalence-based, bottom-up cost-of-illness approach. We estimated indirect costs based on productivity loss due to absenteeism, presenteeism and premature deaths. We costed the scaling up of interventions using the WHO Costing Tool and assessed the health impact of interventions using the OneHealth Tool. We calculated ROI by comparing productivity and social benefits with the total costs of implementing the interventions.ResultsThe four main NCDs cost the GCC economy nearly US$50 billion in 2019, equal to 3.3% of its gross domestic product. The indirect costs are estimated at US$20 billion or 40% of the total burden. Implementing the four modelled intervention packages in the six GCC countries over 15 years will cost US$14 billion, with an ROI of US$4.9 for every US$1 invested and significant health and social benefits, including 290 000 averted premature deaths.ConclusionBased on the results of these six investment cases, we recommend actions to scale up current WHO-recommended cost-effective interventions, strengthen whole-of-government action, drive the NCD legislative agenda, build out the evidence base, generate additional advocacy material, and increase regional collaboration and data-sharing to establish best practices and monitor impact.
Telemedicine has been appreciated as a smart solution to bridge the gaps in the delivery and coverage of healthcare worldwide. With the great impetus to integrate this service into primary healthcare facilities, evaluating its usability should be an ongoing process. This study aimed to quantitatively evaluate the usability of telemedicine from the primary healthcare physicians’ perspective in Oman. The evaluation was conducted using a cross-sectional study design. A self-administered online questionnaire was developed and validated as a scale to evaluate the usability of telemedicine as a safe and useful communication channel and outpatient record. Following a pilot study, the questionnaire was distributed to a sample of primary healthcare physicians who ran telemedicine clinics in Oman during 2020-2022. The questionnaire was completed by 143 primary healthcare physicians from different governorates. The total mean scale and subscale scores were computed. In addition, the frequency distribution of responses to each question was presented. The results showed that the total mean scale score of the usability of telemedicine in our clinics was 3.43/5.00. The subscale scores of the usability of telemedicine as a safe and useful service, the usability of telemedicine as a communication channel, and the usability of telemedicine as an outpatient record were 3.42/5.00, 3.23/5.00, and 3.99/5.00, respectively. In conclusion, the current telemedicine service in Oman’s primary healthcare facilities has some usability features, but there is still much room for improvement. With logical reasoning, a framework of potential determinants was inferred and proposed to improve the usability of telemedicine services in the future and comply with the principles of biomedical ethics.
Aim: Telemedicine has been appreciated as a smart solution to bridge the gaps in healthcare delivery. Several questionnaires were developed worldwide and designed to evaluate the usability of telemedicine. However, they might be inappropriate or inadequate for all forms of telemedicine services. In this paper, we aim to report on the development and validation process of our telemedicine usability scale. Materials and Methods: The scale was part of a self-administered online questionnaire developed and content validated by a panel of physicians to evaluate the usability of telemedicine from the primary healthcare physicians’ perspective in Oman. The study employed convenient sampling of all eligible primary healthcare physicians, resulting in 143 completed questionnaires. We used the FACTOR software to run exploratory factor analysis on a polychoric matrix. The unweighted least squares extraction method was selected with promin rotation to fit the ordinal data. The psychometric properties, including the reliability measures, unidimensionality, and goodness-of-fit indices, were reported. Results: A three-factor solution satisfied the concept of simple structure and explained about 53% of the total variance. The first factor represented the usability of telemedicine as a safe and useful service; the second factor represented the usability of telemedicine as an outpatient record; the third factor represented the usability of telemedicine as a communication channel. For all factors, Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega were greater than 0.85. The goodness-of-fit indices and measures of unidimensionality were acceptable for the three-factor solution. The same three-factor solution was also evident following the run of exploratory factor analysis on the Pearson correlation matrix. Conclusion: The proposed scale is a multi-faceted scale that has been built on cumulative knowledge and developed according to the best-practice recommendations to ensure its reliability and validity for evaluating the usability of telemedicine from the physicians’ perspective.
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