Teleneurology from 2014 to 2019 in France: Results from a national mandatory hospital survey conducted by the Ministry of Health

Abstract

Telemedicine is a remote medical practice and was legally defined in France in 2009. The first national teleneurology survey was conducted online, in 2019, by neurologists across France. The objective of this study was to describe teleneurology activity in France using an administrative database from the Ministry of Health (MOH). Data was collected from the yearly health care facility (HCF) open access online database in the mandatory yearly hospital declarative survey (SAE). The survey, which first started in 1995, included indicators on telemedicine and teleneurology since 2013. Due to methodological changes in 2014, only results from 2014 onwards were used. The number of HCF declaring teleneurology activities as ‘requesting telemedicine’ (patient site) or ‘being requested for telemedicine’ (distant site), by status of HCF, in public or private, was collected. No data was available for 2018 and 2019. In total, 155 HCF declared teleneurology activities in 2014 (distant site=122, patient site=56) and 236 HCF in 2017 (distant site=180, patient site=90), representing a 65.7% increase in 4 years. The number of HCF on both requesting and requested telemedicine situation was 23 in 2014 and 34 in 2017. The percentage of public HCF varied between 90.4% and 94.4% among the distant site, and between 87.7% and 91.7% among patient site. Teleneurology in HCF increased in France from 2014 to 2017 as declared in the SAE and was mainly performed by public hospitals. This study was the first to be conducted on teleneurology at a national scale from an open database.