PATIENT PERCEPTION AND SATISFACTION ON TELEMEDICINE

Telemedicine is the practice of using electronic information and communication technology to deliver and assist medical care when participants are physically apart. The majority of clinical telemedicine applications have not been investigated to determine their impacts on the quality, accessibility, or cost of healthcare. Even if there isn’t much data to support telemedicine efficacy compared to other medical services, the challenges facing health plans, patients, doctors, and policymakers are driving up demand for this information. This supports telemedicine’s usefulness, worth, and accessibility. The Malaysian government launched Malaysia’s Telemedicine Blueprint 1997 project to integrate telemedicine into the national healthcare system. Telemedicine can be easily implemented and used by Malaysians thanks to the country’s modern technology. The effects of telemedicine indicate modifications to the contingencies that healthcare providers must deal with. These providers must reconfigure and redesign their organizational structures in order to better fit the altered environment and technology and maintain competitiveness.

According to studies on patient satisfaction, interactive video consultations between doctors and patients are generally well-received by users. Such studies typically make use of questionnaire-based surveys that do not ask patients why they liked or hated the service; as a result, the real causes of satisfaction or dissatisfaction are unknown. Additionally, these studies haven’t looked at departmental communication problems. Since we know relatively little about how patients view these services and their subjective concepts of acceptability and utility, it is necessary to contextualize the usually positive reaction of patients reported by such questionnaires.

There is a lack of study on the long-term acceptability of virtual consultation for healthcare delivery and the perception of care received, despite the potential socioeconomic benefits and the availability of guidelines on optimal use (Wong et al., 2021). There are also worries that the standard of treatment in the virtual care setting could be compromised (Hardcastle and Ogbogu, 2020). As a result, we are interested in learning how individuals perceive the socioeconomic effects of telehealth utilization in virtual care consultations as well as the quality of healthcare services.

Understanding patient perception of telemedicine and approaches to enhance the business model in private healthcare are crucial. The findings of this study are expected to assist healthcare management in enhancing the current telemedicine business model to increase patient satisfaction during virtual consultations.

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