Abstract
BackgroundTelehealth is growing and its application in palliative care is seen as a solution to pressures on palliative care services. A 2010 UK review reported growing awareness of telehealth in palliative care but a lack of evidence-based research to support its use. The primary aim of this review was to describe the current use of telehealth in palliative care in the UK and evaluate telehealth initiatives against a digital service standard. The secondary aim was to explore whether telehealth results in a reduction in emergency care access.MethodsSystematic review of the literature with thematic synthesis. Records were screened and data extracted by two reviewers. EMBASE, MEDLINE, CINAHL, Psychinfo and Cochrane central register for controlled trials were searched using pre-defined terms. Hand searching of conference literature, thesis databases and citation tracking was also conducted. The protocol for this systematic review was registered with PROSPERO and can be found at http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.php?ID=CRD42017080038.ResultsThe search identified 3807 titles and 30 studies were included in the review. Telehealth was used to support patients and carers, electronic record keeping and professional education. Notably, the number of home telemonitoring initiatives for patients had increased from the 2010 review. Despite this variety, many studies were small scale, descriptive and provided little evidence of evaluation of the service. Ten papers were sufficiently detailed to allow appraisal against the digital service standard and only one of these met all of the criteria to some extent. Seven studies made reference to emergency care access.ConclusionsAlthough there is growth of telehealth services, there remains a lack of evaluation and robust study design meaning conclusions regarding the clinical application of telehealth in palliative care cannot be drawn. There is insufficient evidence to appreciate any benefit of telehealth on access to emergency care. Future work is needed to evaluate the use of telehealth in palliative care and improve telehealth design in line with digital service standards.
Highlights
Telehealth is growing and its application in palliative care is seen as a solution to pressures on palliative care services
Similar to the review published by Kidd et al in 2010 [18], this paper provides a useful overview and description of how telehealth initiatives are being used in palliative care in the United Kingdom (UK)
This review demonstrates that a variety of UK palliative care telehealth initiatives continue to be described in the published literature
Summary
Telehealth is growing and its application in palliative care is seen as a solution to pressures on palliative care services. A 2010 UK review reported growing awareness of telehealth in palliative care but a lack of evidence-based research to support its use. The primary aim of this review was to describe the current use of telehealth in palliative care in the UK and evaluate telehealth initiatives against a digital service standard. Several studies have shown the benefit of Supporting patients with palliative care needs to access services and avoid hospital admission requires increasing support by community general and specialist palliative. The Health Resources and Service Administration expand on this description in their definition to include education; “the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support and promote long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health and health administration” [8]
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