Adoption of Telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ibero-America: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 caused a major international public health crisis and led to the imposition of social distancing measures to contain the spread of the virus. In this context, the use of telehealth skyrocketed as the only way to deliver healthcare to patients during a lockdown was remotely. The countries of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula were severely hit by the pandemic and the prospects and challenges associated with widespread adoption of telehealth are unique. The goal of this systematic literature review is to explore how telehealth has been used during the pandemic to prevent, diagnose, treat and control diseases in Ibero-America. Thus, we sought to identify the main keywords, themes, theoretical frameworks and methodologies used by researchers in this area. We used several tools for bibliographic management like Rayyan, VOSViewer and NVIVO and followed the PRISMA protocol. Our analysis of themes showed the existence of 3 nodes within the literature: students, teachers and education. After searching in 6 databases, 1826 articles were found. After excluding the duplicates (231 articles), we screened and read the titles and abstracts of 1595 articles. Only 119 articles met the inclusion criteria. Finally, after a full-text analysis, a final sample of 106 articles was selected for analysis. Spain and Brazil are the countries who have produced the greatest volume of research in the region. The public sector is the largest funder of research on this topic by far especially at national level.  Our findings show that the research output in the region of Ibero-America (Latin America and Iberia) on this topic is still relatively small when compared to regions like North America.