Addressing Health Service Equity Through Telehealth: A Systematic Review of Reviews

Abstract

Despite advancements in global healthcare, significant regional disparities persist, especially in non-urban areas. Challenges such as the scarcity of medical facilities and lack of healthcare professionals hinder access to quality healthcare for these populations. It has been proposed that telemedicine has the potential to address these inequities and improve the quality of care received by people living in regional and remote areas by improving access to care. Access to health services encompasses six dimensions: accessibility, acceptability, affordability, adequacy, awareness, and availability. It is likely that a telemedicine initiative will need to address more than one of these dimensions of access if it is to achieve sustained effectiveness in practice. Understanding the mechanisms through which a telemedicine initiative works will be key for policy makers looking to invest in initiatives that seek to address inequities in access to healthcare services.   Our overall aim is to develop a virtual care evaluation framework for policy-makers that explicitly accounts for the different dimensions of access, and will support decision-making around initiatives designed to address inequity. As a first step towards the development of the evaluation framework, the aim of the current systematic review is to describe if and how published studies of telemedicine in non-urban regions have considered the dimensions of health service access described above.