Telemedicine's Future in the Post-COVID-19 Era: Benefits and Challenges to Telehealth Adoption after the Pandemic

Lifestyles changed dramatically with the Covid-19 pandemic. The most noticeable widespread changes in behavior of patients was the consumption of medical informatics that allow access to care remotely for its users. Covid-19 has established telemedicine as a new structure of health care delivery. With all the investments and changes that came with this emerging technology, it remains of great importance to focus on the future of telemedicine. To address that, we design a sequential mixed methods design study. The study has both qualitative and quantitative data through a survey with open-ended and closed-ended questions. Respondents were recruited by Rare Patient Voice panel. We received 2875 responses. The quantitative part of the study used the health belief model factors as a framework. We run logistic regression models to test the impact of each factor on the intention of future telemedicine adoption of the respondents. For the qualitative part of the study, we use thematic analysis to identify the main benefits and challenges that would encourage users to or prevent them from using telemedicine after Covid-19 pandemic is over.We received 2875 responses. We found that with positive perception towards telehealth experiences, perceived unsafety related to in-person visits, the increase of use of telehealth caused by Covid-19, perceived benefits such as convenience of telehealth, insurance covering online visits and safety encouraged patients to adopt more telehealth with respectively (P<0.001, OR=2.4; P=0.003, OR=2.79; P<0.001, OR=3.02; P<0.001, OR=; P<0.001, OR=15.05; P<0.001, OR=4.53; P<0.001, OR=2.91). By further exploring the benefits and the challenges of telehealth, we found that patients and caregivers think there are more advantages to it than disadvantages. The advantages consist of convenience, access to care, efficiency, affordability, anonymity, communication and connectedness, usability, safety etc. The challenges consisted of systemsrelated limitations, work environment issues and communication issues etc.More efforts need to be made to improve telehealth design and improve the infrastructure of healthcare systems to align with the telemedicine requirements. Policies need to take into consideration the regulations’ updates needed to ensure successful telehealth adoption by users.