Developing a scale to evaluate the usability of telemedicine as a safe and useful communication channel and outpatient record

Abstract

Aim: Telemedicine has been appreciated as a smart solution to bridge the gaps in healthcare delivery. Several questionnaires were developed worldwide and designed to evaluate the usability of telemedicine. However, they might be inappropriate or inadequate for all forms of telemedicine services. In this paper, we aim to report on the development and validation process of our telemedicine usability scale. Materials and Methods: The scale was part of a self-administered online questionnaire developed and content validated by a panel of physicians to evaluate the usability of telemedicine from the primary healthcare physicians’ perspective in Oman. The study employed convenient sampling of all eligible primary healthcare physicians, resulting in 143 completed questionnaires. We used the FACTOR software to run exploratory factor analysis on a polychoric matrix. The unweighted least squares extraction method was selected with promin rotation to fit the ordinal data. The psychometric properties, including the reliability measures, unidimensionality, and goodness-of-fit indices, were reported. Results: A three-factor solution satisfied the concept of simple structure and explained about 53% of the total variance. The first factor represented the usability of telemedicine as a safe and useful service; the second factor represented the usability of telemedicine as an outpatient record; the third factor represented the usability of telemedicine as a communication channel. For all factors, Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega were greater than 0.85. The goodness-of-fit indices and measures of unidimensionality were acceptable for the three-factor solution. The same three-factor solution was also evident following the run of exploratory factor analysis on the Pearson correlation matrix. Conclusion: The proposed scale is a multi-faceted scale that has been built on cumulative knowledge and developed according to the best-practice recommendations to ensure its reliability and validity for evaluating the usability of telemedicine from the physicians’ perspective.