Telemedical services in Hungary. Are we on a right way?

Mária Markó-Kucsera, Elias Dally, Zsuzsanna Mate, Edit Paulik

Keywords: telemedicine, general practitioner, satisfaction

Background:

The integration of telemedicine into general practice represents a transformative advancement in healthcare delivery, offering significant potential to enhance patient care, accessibility, and efficiency. Telemedicine facilitates remote consultations, diagnosis, and treatment, thereby improving access to medical services for patients in rural or underserved areas.

Research questions:

Our study aims to find out how currently practising general practitioners (GPs) perceive the use of telemedicine systems. After the pressure generated by the pandemic, is the use of telemedicine systems evolving to improve care?

Method:

The online questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was delivered in Hungary, in 2024. Altogether 455 doctors, mainly GPs completed the questionnaire about doctors’ demographic data, the use and attitude towards telemedicine. The data were analysed by descriptive and analytical statistics. IBM SPSS 28.0 software was used for the statistical procedure. The participation was voluntary and anonymous. Ethical permission: BMEÜ-1777-1-2022-EKU

Results:

The average age of the sample was 56.8±11.9 years, 64.5% were females, almost all participants were currently working as active GP. Most part (90.8%) of respondents regularly used telemedicine tools in their patient care. The major forms of telemedicine were prescribing medicines and providing telephone consultations. The non-use of telemedicine (9.2%) was explained by the shortage of knowledge (38%) or effective tools (31%). The range of subjective perceptions includes a decrease in professionalism of patient care, effective physician-patient communication, and patient compliance during the telemedical service use.

Conclusions:

Future advancements in telehealth technology and policy development are essential to address the challenges and realize the full potential of telemedicine in general practice. In order to provide high quality patient care using telemedicine systems, it is essential to educate the users of the system, both in terms of the use of the devices, data protection and communication.

Points for discussion:

how can we increase the quality of the telemedicine care?

what influences the use of telemedicine in everyday life?

how can the doctor patient communication in telemedicine be improved?

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