Evidence Based Telemedicine in a Hospital Setting

The use of telemedicine is increasing, but not all solutions are equally successful. The website telemedicine.cimt.dk provides an overview of evidence based telemedicine in a hospital setting. On the website, you can search more than 300 articles on telemedicine, filter your search on medical specialities, technology or clinical effect. The search results contain tables with relevant data on diagnosis, intervention, technology and results of the studies in relation to clinical effect, patient experience, economy and implementation.

The website is the result of the project Evidence Based Telemedicine, initiated by the Region of Southern Denmark. The region has a number of efficient digital solutions and is leading in both Denmark and Europe when it comes to telemedicine. But it is difficult to implement the new solutions at the regional hospitals, and some technologies are only in use at the particular hospital where they were invented. One of the underlying reasons is that we don’t have a comprehensive view of the use of digital health technology or of the effect or impact of the technologies.

To help the clinical departments at the hospitals in the Region of Southern Denmark assess which evidence based telemedicine solutions might make a positive difference for their hospital, the website presents the insight available in scholarly literature about the content and effect of the technologies.

The website gives access to a catalogue of the digital technologies for each medical speciality and an outline of the assessment of all relevant articles. To make the results easy to decode, there is a colouring system of red-yellow-green for the assessment of clinical effect, patient experience and expenses.

With the website’s presentation of scholarly literature on telemedicine, the clinical departments can get a quick insight into the possibilities for telemedicine for their speciality in particular. And now it is up to the departments to assess which technologies are reelvant for their patients and their organisation.

Data is derived from a systematic literature search in the PubMed database (conducted in September 2019) for scientific, international literature on digital health technology. We searched for randomised studies or studies with control groups with focus on the effect of telemedicine for hospital patients, published within the last ten years.

The literature search resulted in 2825 hits. 570 articles were included for full text review and 331 articles were included for data extraction and assessment. The results from 22 different specialities are presented on the website telemedicine.cimt.dk in tables  which provide an overview of potential technologies, patient groups and effect.

In addition, the project searched The Telemedicine Map for relevant projects and conducted semi-structured interviews with regional experts on their experiences with existing telemedicine solutions. The Telemedicine Map provided scientific documentation from  eleven projects. Interviews with regional experts provided data and experience from nine Danish solutions in the different regions.

As described in the agreement on budget 2019 for the Region of Southern Denmark, the  agreement between the Danish government and the Danish Regions presented new financial terms for the Danish hospitals with an extra emphasis on digital health technology, including telemedicine. This implies a demand for an increase in the number of virtual patient pathways and implementation of digital solutions to ensure coherence for the patient.

The agreement resulted in a need for overview of existing digital solutions that was easy to access and use for the health professionals in the Region of Southern Denmark.