Chronic Disease Patients' Engagement in Interprofessional Telehealth Collaboration in Primary Care: A Scoping Review

Abstract

With the rise of people being affected with chronic illness, now the leading cause of mortality worldwide, primary care is overwhelmed with the demand for healthcare services. Primary healthcare is the first resource for patients living with chronic illness, but in 2019, COVID-19 brought healthcare professionals to increase services through virtual care for patients living with chronic illness. In the workplace, such professionals often need to be sufficiently resourced to collaborate, to address collaborative care barriers in telehealth and to keep patients engaged in their health. We performed a scoping review to identify how patients living with chronic diseases actively engage and describe their involvement in the process of interprofessional collaboration within the context of telehealth in primary care settings. We followed Arksey and O'Malley's and the Joanna Briggs Institute's methodological guidelines to conduct this scoping review. The analysis of the retained twelve studies showed little distinction between the experience of interprofessional collaboration from the patient's perspective in a telehealth context compared to a face-to-face context. However, we were able to identify gaps (eg, limited insight onto engagement dynamic, lack of patient-centric research, and insufficient research on patient engagement) relating to the experiences of patients, patient engagement, and professionals who have used telehealth. In an era of digital innovations, this lack of literature regarding the patient experience may jeopardize the quality of the interprofessional collaboration services offered to patients and patient engagement. This gap in patient engagement integrated into interprofessional collaboration in a telehealth context needs to be addressed.

Keywords: disease management; interprofessional collaboration; patient-centeredness; primary care; tele-medicine.

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