Occupational health professionals’ experiences with telehealth services: usage, perceived usefulness and ease of use

Abstract

BackgroundIn occupational health care, telehealth services implementation requires the professionals to change their way of working because they have had to incorporate the telehealth services into their daily routines. Understanding how occupational health professionals relate to and experience telehealth services may aid in its implementation. However, an overview of telehealth services’ use in occupational health care is lacking. The aim of this study was to provide insight into the telehealth services that are used in occupational health care and identify their factors related to occupational health professionals’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use.MethodsThe present cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted in May-June 2022 in Finland. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run to test the relationships between demographic variables and the rate of usefulness, and ease of use variables. Scheffe test was used to make comparisons among group means in an analysis of variance (ANOVA) experiment.ResultsAccording to the results that investigated the ease of use of telehealth services, the respondents mostly felt that using telehealth services was easy and easy to learn. Profession, work experience, and information and communication technology skills were determinants related to perceived usefulness of telehealth services, while profession and information and communication technology skills were related to perceived ease of use, respectively.ConclusionsIn this survey, quite a fair agreement was found among occupational health professionals regarding the perceived usefulness and ease of use of telehealth services. However, the study results suggest that occupational telehealth services are most likely to be useful and easy to use when professionals’ information and communication technology skills are at a good level.