A Web-Based Survey Assessing the Attitudes of Health Care Professionals in Germany Toward the Use of Telemedicine in Pregnancy Monitoring: Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The demand for fetal monitoring and constant reassurance is high in pregnant women. Consequently, pregnant women use various health apps and are more likely to visit emergency departments due to subjective but nonurgent complaints. However, electronic health (eHealth) and mobile health (mHealth) solutions are rarely used to prevent nonurgent emergency consultations. To implement modern care solutions, a better understanding of the attitudes, fears, and hopes of health care professionals toward eHealth and mHealth is needed. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate the attitudes of health care professionals in obstetrics toward telemedicine. METHODS: A quantitative Web-based survey on health care professionals in obstetrics in Germany was conducted. The participants included nurses, midwives, and physicians of all age groups and job positions working in hospitals that provide various levels of health care. The questionnaire comprised 24 questions about the characteristics of the study population, views about emergency consultations in obstetrics, attitude toward telemedicine, job satisfaction, and sleeping behavior. RESULTS: In total, 244 health care professionals participated in the Web-based survey. In general, health care professionals were skeptical (170/233, 72.9%) about the use of telemedicine in obstetrics; however, 55.8% (130/233) recognized its potential. Moreover, 72% (62/86) of physicians were optimistic in using apps for pregnancy monitoring, whereas 36.1% (47/130) of nonphysicians (P<.001) were not. Significantly, more nonphysicians rejected such developments (75/130, 57.7% rejected) compared with physicians (24/86, 28%; P<.001). We also found that obstetricians with more than 10 years of work-experience are more skeptical; however, approximately 49% (18/37) of them believed that telemedicine could reduce nonurgent emergency consultations, whereas 73.2% (106/145) of obstetricians with less than 5 years of experience (P=.01) thought otherwise. Our survey revealed a high job satisfaction and a prevalence of regular sleeping problems of 45.9% (91/198) among health care professionals in obstetrics. Surprisingly, both job satisfaction and sleeping problems were independent from the number of night shifts per month (P=.77 and P=.99, respectively). Yet, 56.6% (112/198) of the survey participants thought they would be happier with their job if they had to work fewer night shifts per month. CONCLUSIONS: Our study reveals an ambivalent attitude toward the use of telemedicine among health care professionals in obstetrics in Germany at the moment. Efforts to promote the use of telemedicine should focus on nurses and midwives because these groups are the most skeptical. By contrast, particularly young physicians recognize the potential of apps in patient care and would like to use such technology in pregnancy monitoring.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".