Telehealth During COVID-19: A Look at Healthcare Providers’ Experiences

Abstract

Healthcare providers were placed under considerable strain during the COVID-19 pandemic. To exacerbate matters more, a sudden shift to telehealth became necessary to provide safe provider-patient visits. The increased strain created by the sudden need to implement a telehealth protocol is believed to have decreased workplace satisfaction. This study aims to investigate how the rapid shift to telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic affected healthcare providers’ workplace satisfaction, how virtual visits created challenges and opportunities for provider-patient communication, and how the use of telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic affected healthcare providers’ capacity to engage in patient-centered communication. For this study, 15 primary healthcare providers were interviewed. Learning a new system and protocols in order to conduct virtual visits, as well as new obstacles that providers never encountered before, created a challenge for providers all over. A year after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, telehealth has demonstrated the benefits of permanently incorporating it as a tool for providers to utilize in the future of medicine