Fowler Teresa E, De Leo Gianluca
Department of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, Augusta, Georgia, USA.
School of Public Health, Augusta University, Augusta, Georgia, USA.
Telemed Rep. 2025 Aug 11;6(1):195-215. doi: 10.1177/26924366251365510. eCollection 2025.
Telemedicine has become an important mechanism for delivering health care in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While some medical subspecialties were able to rapidly integrate telecare into their workflow, ophthalmology is one field in which telemedicine has not been as widely adopted. In this systematic review, we analyze published studies assessing patient and provider viewpoints on telemedicine for eye care. Our aim is to understand how adoption of teleophthalmology is being studied and whether definitive conclusions regarding patient and provider perspectives on telecare can be drawn from published literature.
We performed a systematic PubMed search for studies utilizing surveys to assess patient and provider perspectives regarding remote eye care. Articles were excluded if they were irrelevant to teleophthalmology, did not assess patient or eye care provider perspectives regarding teleophthalmology, assessed specific platforms or aspects of eye care, were reviews without primary data, or if the survey used was not available. The questionnaires from the included articles were analyzed for validation status, subspecialty, question wording, and response format.
The PubMed search returned 92 articles, 22 of which were included in the final dataset after exclusions. Only four studies utilized externally validated questionnaires, although several additional studies were based on validated items. Survey length, wording, and response formatting varied across the studies. These 22 studies contained responses from 3,796 patients and 2,388 eye care professionals, but the lack of standardization between the surveys makes high power conclusions impossible.
The results of this review demonstrate a need to develop a standardized and validated survey instrument specifically for assessing teleophthalmology to identify barriers to widespread implementation.
在新冠疫情之后，远程医疗已成为提供医疗保健的重要机制。虽然一些医学亚专业能够迅速将远程护理整合到其工作流程中，但眼科是远程医疗尚未得到广泛应用的领域之一。在这项系统评价中，我们分析已发表的研究，评估患者和医疗服务提供者对眼科远程医疗的看法。我们的目的是了解远程眼科的应用是如何被研究的，以及是否能够从已发表的文献中得出关于患者和医疗服务提供者对远程护理看法的明确结论。
我们在PubMed上进行了系统检索，查找利用调查来评估患者和医疗服务提供者对远程眼科护理看法的研究。如果文章与远程眼科无关、未评估患者或眼科护理提供者对远程眼科的看法、评估的是眼科护理的特定平台或方面、是没有原始数据的综述，或者所使用的调查不可用，则将其排除。对纳入文章的问卷进行分析，评估其有效性、亚专业、问题措辞和回答格式。
PubMed检索返回92篇文章，排除后最终数据集中纳入22篇。只有四项研究使用了经过外部验证的问卷，不过还有几项研究是基于经过验证的项目。各项研究的调查长度、措辞和回答格式各不相同。这22项研究包含了3796名患者和2388名眼科护理专业人员的回答，但由于调查之间缺乏标准化，无法得出强有力的结论。
本综述结果表明，需要开发一种专门用于评估远程眼科的标准化且经过验证的调查工具，以确定广泛实施的障碍。
