Telemonitoring readiness among Austrian diabetic patients: A cross-sectional validation study

Abstract

Digitalized healthcare services offer remote and cost-effective treatment of diabetes patients. Thus, the present online study analyzed the readiness to use telemonitoring among Austrian diabetes patients. We developed and validated a German version of the patient telehealth readiness assessment tool and performed quantitative context analysis of free-text comments on perceived barriers and benefits of telemonitoring. Participants (n = 41, 42.6% females) achieved a medium average readiness level for telemonitoring. The three top benefits were intensified care, shorter travel and waiting times, and better therapy adjustment. The top three barriers were data privacy issues, loss of personal communication and focus on blood sugar, and teledoctor competence. Diabetes patients represent a suitable target group for remote treatment opportunities. However, a shift from traditional face-to-face medical care to exclusive telemonitoring treatment from diagnosis to consultation and treatment requires fundamental new legal framework conditions.

Mobile and Online Health Information: Exploring Digital Media Use among Austrian Parents

“…As we conducted an online exploratory study, we abstained from sample size calculation and did not use advanced recruiting strategies and incentives for participation, which could clearly increase response rates in follow-up studies [22]. Nevertheless, similar sample sizes are also reported in related studies [8,18,20,42]. As expected, the age of parents correlated with the age of the children.…”

“…We conducted a Web-based questionnaire study among a cross-section of the Austrian population. We developed a German study questionnaire based on previous surveys and details are reported elsewhere [ 1 , 10 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. The online survey was enabled by the Web-based survey tool SoSci Survey and was accessible barrier-free from 28 February to 14 June 2018 [ 21 ].…”

“…In the present study, we translated and adapted the patient/public tool using translation and back-translation procedures to develop a German study questionnaire [ 1 , 10 , 18 , 20 , 27 ]. We pre-tested the questionnaire with eleven participants to ensure general comprehensibility, face validity, and content validity.…”

Perceptions of Practitioners on Telehealth and App Use for Smoking Cessation and COPD Care—An Exploratory Study

“…As we conducted an online study, we did not use incentives for participation, which could clearly increase response rates in follow-up studies. Although similar sample sizes are reported in related studies, the response rate was low, potentially mirroring the fact that health professionals are commonly considered as a hard to reach population, and [ 18 , 19 , 33 , 49 , 50 , 51 ]. Notably, we abstained from reporting results of inferential statistics, as, potentially due to the small sample size in the respective subgroups, age, gender, and specialization did not differ regarding the telehealth readiness score (data not shown).…”

“…A further part of the survey contained the commonly used practitioner telehealth readiness assessment tool (PRAT) in German validated in prior research [ 18 , 21 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ]. The PRAT is a scale of 17 items using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from disagree = 1 to agree = 5 to assess a broad range of aspects of readiness for telehealth.…”