Faculty of Health Disciplines, Athabasca University, 1 University Drive, Athabasca, AB, T9S 3A3, Canada.
Department of Sociology, Western University, London, ON, Canada.
Syst Rev. 2023 Mar 6;12(1):31. doi: 10.1186/s13643-023-02198-1.
Virtual care is transforming the nature of healthcare, particularly with the accelerated shift to telehealth and virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health profession regulators face intense pressures to safely facilitate this type of healthcare while upholding their legislative mandate to protect the public. Challenges for health profession regulators have included providing practice guidance for virtual care, changing entry-to-practice requirements to include digital competencies, facilitating interjurisdictional virtual care through licensure and liability insurance requirements, and adapting disciplinary procedures. This scoping review will examine the literature on how the public interest is protected when regulating health professionals providing virtual care.
This review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) scoping review methodology. Academic and grey literature will be retrieved from health sciences, social sciences, and legal databases using a comprehensive search strategy underpinned by Population-Concept-Context (PCC) inclusion criteria. Articles published in English since January 2015 will be considered for inclusion. Two reviewers will independently screen titles and abstracts and full-text sources against specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Discrepancies will be resolved through discussion or by a third reviewer. One research team member will extract relevant data from the selected documents and a second will validate the extractions.
Results will be presented in a descriptive synthesis that highlights implications for regulatory policy and professional practice, as well as study limitations and knowledge gaps that warrant further research. Given the rapid expansion of virtual care provision by regulated health professionals in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mapping the literature on how the public interest is protected in this rapidly evolving digital health sector may help inform future regulatory reform and innovation.
This protocol is registered with the Open Science Framework ( https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BD2ZX ).
虚拟医疗正在改变医疗保健的性质，尤其是在 COVID-19 大流行期间，远程医疗和虚拟医疗的加速转变。卫生专业人员监管机构面临着巨大的压力，需要在确保公众安全的前提下，安全地提供这种类型的医疗服务。卫生专业人员监管机构面临的挑战包括为虚拟医疗提供实践指导、改变执业准入要求以纳入数字能力、通过许可和责任保险要求促进司法管辖区之间的虚拟医疗、以及调整纪律程序。本范围综述将考察在监管提供虚拟医疗的卫生专业人员时如何保护公共利益的文献。
本综述将遵循 Joanna Briggs 研究所 (JBI) 的范围综述方法。将使用全面的搜索策略从健康科学、社会科学和法律数据库中检索学术和灰色文献，该策略由人口-概念-背景 (PCC) 纳入标准支撑。将考虑自 2015 年 1 月以来以英文发表的文章纳入。两名评审员将独立筛选标题和摘要以及全文来源，以确定具体的纳入和排除标准。分歧将通过讨论或第三名评审员解决。一名研究团队成员将从选定的文件中提取相关数据，第二名成员将验证提取内容。
结果将以描述性综合呈现，重点介绍对监管政策和专业实践的影响，以及需要进一步研究的研究限制和知识空白。鉴于受监管的卫生专业人员为应对 COVID-19 大流行而迅速扩大虚拟医疗服务，对在这个快速发展的数字医疗领域如何保护公共利益的文献进行映射可能有助于为未来的监管改革和创新提供信息。
本方案在开放科学框架（https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BD2ZX）上注册。
