Medical Physics and Digital Innovation Laboratory, School of Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
School of Social Sciences, Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece.
PLoS One. 2023 Feb 2;18(2):e0278758. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278758. eCollection 2023.
The emergency presented through the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the need to adopt remote, technology-driven solutions and make healthcare services more resilient. To do so, we need technological applications (i.e., telemedicine) that are designed and tailored to the end-users (i.e., chronic patients) needs and the type of healthcare service they get (i.e., cancer care). The requirements above are especially relevant to Greece, being a country with numerous sparsely populated regions (e.g., islands, regions at the borders) and a deteriorating access to healthcare for all citizens. Trying to address such diverse problems and needs, there have been multiple, different telemedicine and telecare projects in Greece in the past years. To support the future design and implementation of such endeavours, in this study we translated a questionnaire measuring the acceptance of telemedicine by patients and adapted it to the Greek context. We continued by running a small-scale pilot with 73 Greek women with breast cancer to assess the adapted instrument for its reliability and construct validity. The created questionnaire had good overall and internal reliability scores for most sub-scales. Factor analysis did not identify the same number of latent dimensions as the original theoretical model. Reverse wording items needing to be recoded were identified, and items that could be omitted in future versions of the questionnaire. Increasing the sample size for the purposes of a longitudinal study, the construct, convergent, and discriminant validity are elements to be further examined in future studies. It is envisaged that the creation of this questionnaire will support the adoption of telemedicine by Greek healthcare services into more routine areas of patient care provision.
通过 COVID-19 大流行而出现的紧急情况暴露了采用远程、技术驱动型解决方案并使医疗保健服务更具弹性的必要性。为此，我们需要设计和定制满足最终用户（即慢性病患者）需求以及他们所获得的医疗保健服务类型（即癌症护理）的技术应用（即远程医疗）。上述要求对于希腊特别重要，因为该国拥有众多人口稀少的地区（如岛屿、边境地区），并且所有公民的医疗保健服务获取情况都在恶化。为了解决这些多样化的问题和需求，过去几年中，希腊已经开展了多个不同的远程医疗和远程护理项目。为了支持未来此类努力的设计和实施，在本研究中，我们翻译了一份测量患者对远程医疗接受程度的问卷，并将其适用于希腊的情况。我们接着对 73 名希腊乳腺癌女性进行了小规模试点研究，以评估该工具在希腊的可靠性和结构有效性。该问卷的大多数子量表具有良好的整体和内部可靠性得分。因子分析并未确定与原始理论模型相同数量的潜在维度。确定了需要重新编码的反向措辞项目以及未来版本的问卷中可以省略的项目。为了进行纵向研究而增加样本量，未来的研究将进一步检验结构、收敛和判别有效性等元素。预计该问卷的创建将支持希腊医疗保健服务将远程医疗应用于更常规的患者护理领域。
