Experiences of nurse practitioners with telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes to the way nurse practitioners (NPs) provided care for patients, including the explosive and instantaneous use of telehealth in lieu of face-to-face services to maintain safe health care access and provision for patients and providers. Although the literature abounds with patient perspectives and benefits of telehealth, little is found about the perceptions and experiences of NPs providing telehealth services during this time when telehealth was the primary care mode of providing nonacute care. This mixed-methods, descriptive, exploratory study describes demographic and quantitative data about telehealth experiences collected from NPs across the nation early in the pandemic during fall 2020, and similar quantitative data collected later in spring 2021 from NPs in one state. Significant findings between the 2020 national and 2021 state NP data include years of NP experience and the NP perceived barriers in the provision of telehealth services. Major patient-centric telehealth barriers were patient comfort with and accessibility to telehealth software. Major NP perceived telehealth barriers were regulatory laws, difficulty including telehealth visits into workflow when seeing patients in person, and comfort using telehealth software. Specific strategies can help to overcome identified telehealth barriers.