Teledermatology in German-Speaking Countries: Patients’ and Physicians’ Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background With increasing digitalization and the current pandemic, teledermatology has gained importance in German-speaking countries in recent years. The regulation on remote consultation methods was recently relaxed, allowing for a more widespread introduction of teledermatological health care services. Objective The aim of this work is to evaluate a store-and-forward (SAF) teledermatology application from the patients’ and physicians’ perspectives. Methods We carried out a noncontrolled user survey of the web-based platform derma2go in the course of the remote consultation by German dermatologists. Through the platform, patients with dermatological requests could obtain expert advice within a few hours after entering their medical history and uploading photographs of their skin lesions. Results A total of 1476 (t1) and 361 (t2) patients and 2207 dermatologist ratings were included within the evaluation. A large proportion of participants were satisfied with the application (t1=83.9%; t2=81.2%). Most participants also rated the usability as high (t1=83.0% satisfied) and were satisfied with the response time of the dermatologists (t1=92.0% satisfied). In addition, a large majority agreed with the statement that they trusted the web-based application (t1=90.5%). At t2, 20.0% of those who participated stated that their skin problem had healed; for 49.8% of participants, it had already improved; for 22.0% of participants, it was unchanged; and for 3.5% of participants, skin problems had worsened. For 64.0% of users, the request was completely resolved, and for 24.2% or users, it was partly resolved as result of the consultation. For 79.7% of users, no additional information was needed by the participating dermatologists. From the practitioners’ perspective, 71.2% of all requests were completely resolved and 24.7% were partly resolved. Conclusions Our evaluation has shown that SAF applications, exemplified by derma2go, are likely to improve access to dermatological care, with a high patient satisfaction and a high rate of resolved requests, from the patients’ and physicians’ perspectives. In the future, teledermatological SAF applications can represent a supplement to the existing routine care in dermatology. The indications, patient groups, and use cases, for which the application is particularly suitable, will be determined in further studies.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".