Human-Centered Evaluation for Broadband Tertiary Outpatient Telehealth: A Case Study

Abstract

We present a pilot trial of a broadband telehealth system for tertiary outpatient consultations and use it as a case study to explore issues that arise in designing and evaluating broadband telehealth at a tertiary level of health care. The trial used outpatient consultations for pediatric surgical patients; these consultations involve high levels of interpersonal communications, multiple participants, and the need to share interactive access to large patient data sets. We used a human-centered evaluation approach applied at the level of the health care application (in the hospital setting using actual clinical consultations). The results from the case study indicate that this is the appropriate evaluation approach for early stage trials rather than the traditional randomized controlled trials. The different groups of participants (specialists, patients and parents, supporting clinicians) had different perspectives on the telehealth consultations and different criteria for success and future telehealth evaluations need to take these multiple points of view into account.