Evaluation of Awareness and Attitude of Telemedicine among Primary Healthcare Workers in Deprived Area Health Centers

Abstract

Background. Telemedicine has the potential to make healthcare more efficient, organized, and available and is a more beneficial technology that can ease preventive treatment and improve long-term health management. This is especially essential for those who face financial or regional reasons to get quality treatment. Telemedicine in Iran is a new medical field and a noble way to access medical facilities for populations living in deprived areas, and the primary healthcare workers in these deprived medical centers are the implementers of telemedicine in those areas; we aimed to investigate the awareness and attitude towards telemedicine among all the healthcare workers in these centers. Method. This is a descriptive cross-sectional study at the Health Centers of Raz County in North Khorasan Province, Iran, and 149 healthcare workers were included. For collecting information, we used a questionnaire that consisted of two parts. The first part contains the demographic data of health care workers, and the second part includes the 5-point Likert scale questionnaire (questions on telemedicine awareness, attitude, and self-report readiness). Result. Most participants (51%) were male, and 69.8% were married. The most frequent sources of information about telemedicine are colleagues (40.3%), continuing education (24.7%), and social media and the internet (10.1%). Awareness did not significantly relate to gender, age, marital status, or work experience, but awareness of physicians and midwives is higher than other groups ( $p<0.05$ ). The awareness of healthcare workers using continuing education, articles, workshops, or conferences was significantly higher ( $p<0.05$ ). The attitude scores for most questions are above 3.4 and reflect a positive attitude about telemedicine. Attitudes did not show a significant relation to gender, age, marital status, or work experience. Conclusion. Using telemedicine in developing countries, rural or urban areas have a high potential to improve epidemiological investigations, disease control, and clinical case management. Providing healthcare professionals with more information about new technologies in healthcare, such as telemedicine, can help get a more realistic picture of their perceptions.