Telehealth Consultations – Is There Evidence That They Actually Work?

When I decided to develop Online Physio, I had already paid a hefty deposit to a website developer before I had a sudden thought:

 

‘Geez, I had better check if there is any evidence showing that telehealth actually works’.

 

It was not my finest moment of planning.

 

Fortunately for me, the resultant literature review revealed some great quality research, and better still, the results generally showed that telerehabilitation outcomes were the same, if not better, than in person care.

 

Since then, I have continued to keep my finger on the pulse of new research in Physiotherapy teleconsultations. The evidence base is certainly growing. The sentiment of the findings has not changed either, with many favorable outcomes supporting telehealth.

 

 

Recently, the Dropbox folder of articles I had collected became a bit overwhelming, and I was struggling to search my folder to find what I needed.

 

If there is one superpower that I do have, it is recognizing inefficiencies and streamlining them, so I knew I needed a better solution for collating and categorizing all of the journal articles I had collected on telerehabilitation.

 

It turns out that my techie friend had given me the answer months before when he had told me about Airtable. I had signed up for an account, but had not yet invested the time to learn how to use it.

 

Airtable has done for excel what Canva has done for design. Although not made for hard core number crunching, Airtable allows you to easily create neat, beautiful spreadsheets. They are great for compiling lists of information, and then enabling you to organize and search through it in many different ways.

With my article dilemma in mind, I logged in to my Airtable account, and within the hour had developed a full respository of telerehabilitation articles. They could easily be searched by author, journal, country of origin, year and niche. I was also able to include the full PDF attachment, or a link to the online source.

 

In one final cheeky move, I added a tick box that allows me put a big green tick if the article is complimentary to telehealth.

 

The best bit? I am able to share the table with you here, and every time I update the Airtable, the table embedded here will update too!

 

Please note that these articles are all Physiotherapy telehealth specific, and don’t cover other allied health professions. If you create one for another health profession, please share it with me. Also if you have an article to add to this Airtable, please don’t hesitate to let me know about it.

16 Comments

  1. Kym Siddons on April 26, 2018 at 3:47 pm

    Thanks for sharing your airtable of Telehealth articles Karen- it’s amazing!

    • Karen Finnin on April 26, 2018 at 4:27 pm

      No worries at all Kym. If you come across any that i have missed, be sure to let me know and i’ll update the table.

    • Bert Reitsma on November 18, 2019 at 1:17 pm

      Thanks for sharing. Now to reading.

  2. Orit Hickman on February 20, 2019 at 5:13 am

    Thanks so much for sharing! As I am starting to add telehealth to my business model I am excited to have so much evidence to draw from!

    • Karen Finnin on February 20, 2019 at 5:39 am

      No point us all reinventing the wheel by collecting these Orit – glad to be of assistance. Of course the real thanks goes to the awesome academics who did all the research lol!

  3. Lipi Verma on June 26, 2019 at 10:58 pm

    Thank you for this article & the research table.
    It’s commendable work that you have done in tele-physio world.
    All the very best.
    I am myself working with my organization in developing an app for physio-training sessions.
    We have done a bit of work in the same stream of interest.
    Let’s stay in touch.
    Mail me ,in case you feel we must connect.

    • Karen Finnin on June 27, 2019 at 12:31 pm

      Thank you so much for the kind words Lipi. Your app project sounds really exciting, please keep me posted!

  4. John Stapledon on April 20, 2020 at 1:25 pm

    Hi Karen
    You could add Melbourne uni’s PEAK program in there. Evidence based 5 step program for knee OA

    • Karen Finnin on April 20, 2020 at 2:10 pm

      Oh brilliant John, thanks for the tip. Would it be possible for you to email the link or article info to karen@online.physio?

      • John Stapledon on April 20, 2020 at 7:49 pm

        Here you are Karen,
        https://lms.unimelb.edu.au/canvas
        just log in to other users, (unless you are are a Melbourne uni staff or student)
        Cheers
        John

  5. Lara Koay on April 20, 2020 at 4:55 pm

    Thankyou Karen for being so forthcoming ,leading the way with Telehealth Physio.! It is great to know that there is evidence out there.

    • Karen Finnin on April 22, 2020 at 11:55 am

      Hi Lara, thank you so much for saying that – I’m really glad this resource is helpful. Best of luck with your telehealth journey!

  6. Stephanie Boyd on April 26, 2020 at 5:23 pm

    Thank you Karen, the evidence being gathered together in one place to review is so helpful. Its so kind of you to share with the physio community. We are all treading a new path with telehealth so its really great to see such positive research and that people like yourself have already been out there doing it successfully. Im now totally planning to integrate telehealth in my existing business both now during the lockdown (London) and in the future to give more flexibility to my existing face to face clients.

    • Karen Finnin on April 27, 2020 at 5:39 pm

      Hi Stephanie, I’m so glad this information has been useful for you. It’s exciting that you can see the opportunities in telehealth – best of luck for your journey!

  7. Riya Roy on December 30, 2020 at 6:38 pm

    Thanks for sharing this nice post. It is informative and very useful and knowledgeable.

    • Karen Finnin on January 2, 2021 at 5:51 pm

      I’m so glad it was helpful Riya

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