Lights and Shadows of the Perception of the Use of Telemedicine by Romanian Family Doctors During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Telemedicine has emerged as a critical technology to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 infection. We aim in this work to explore how general practitioners (GPs) perceived the use of telemedicine, recently recognized and reimbursed by the Public Health Insurance House (PHIH) for primary care (PC) provision. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was performed in 2020 in one county of Romania using an anonymous questionnaire that assessed physicians' perceptions regarding teleconsultation, reliability in tele-decision, remote pathology management, pregnant women's surveillance, patients' satisfaction with telemedicine, the need for its further reimbursement. Bivariate correlation was used to measure associations between the investigated issues. RESULTS: More than a quarter of GPs (28.6%) found it easier to address patients' healthcare needs remotely, while 60.7% considered time-consuming teleconsultations compared to face-to-face visits. Tele-diagnostic uncertainty was expressed by 64.3% of physicians, and a quarter were confident in tele-decisions. Almost half of GPs (43%) observed patients' satisfaction with tele-visits, while half said patients encountered difficulties using technology. A large percentage of doctors (62.5%) perceived that patients felt as well treated by virtual as in-person visit and 91.1% suggested post-pandemic reimbursement. The results of the bivariate correlation showed that physicians who perceived positive patient feedback on telemedicine were more supportive of subsequent reimbursement. CONCLUSION: This study showed the GPs' positive perception of the use of telemedicine. Its adoption in PC has shed light on the shadows of the pandemic. The time-consuming nature of teleconsultations, uncertainty in tele-decisions, patients' difficulties in using technology were seen as shadows of telecare. However, most of the GPs surveyed agreed with the need for further reimbursement. Future work should focus on innovative solutions for integrating telemedicine as complementary form of PC, the need for telemedicine-based training for GPs to improve capacity building, and patients' perceptions of virtual care, helping to build trust and satisfaction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".