The Use of and Attitude Towards Telehealth in Rural Communities
Australian Journal of Primary Health 13(3) 29 - 34 This paper
reports on the attitudes of a sample of health care providers
towards the use of telehealth to support rural patients and
integrate rural primary health and urban hospital care.
Telehealth and other information technologies hold the promise
of improving the quality of care for people in rural and remote
areas and for supporting rural primary health care providers.
While seemingly beneficial for rural patients, study
participants believed that telehealth remains underused and
poorly integrated into their practice. In general, participants
thought that telehealth is potentially beneficial but places
constraints on their activities, and few actually used it.
Published literature usually reports either on the success of
telehealth pilot projects or initiatives that are well resourced
and do not reflect the constraints of routine practice, or has
an international focus limiting its relevanc