Clinical effectiveness of Telemedicine: Facilitators and Challenges through the lens of Health professionals

The objective of the study is to explore factors considered to be assessing the clinical effectiveness of telemedicine from the context of health professionals. It seeks to investigate the key facilitating and challenging factors, contributing towards the effective implementation of telemedicine technology. This paper includes commentaries of 37 health professionals to investigate the various aspects regarding the integration of telemedicine into mainstream healthcare system through semi-structured qualitative interviews, adopting a Grounded Theory technique for data analysis. The results depicted that telemedicine is widely beneficial in practices for delivery of healthcare across remote locations, with most of the participants in favor of adopting teleconsultation, that helps in reducing the patient referrals. The key barriers with the telemedicine acceptance were: system hardware, network issues, non-uniform medical records, data privacy issues, and legal bottlenecks. Evaluations can be enhanced by improving system convenience, addressing network issues, data security concerns, and adopting better systematic procedures.