Barreiras à adoção da telemedicina

Abstract

Telemedicine is a type of remote medical care without physical interaction between the doctor and the patient. Despite playing a role in healthcare for many years, it gained notoriety with the Covid-19 pandemic, due to the risk of contagion in healthcare establishments. Even with its practice in the public and private sector, there are still a series of barriers to the adoption of telemedicine. Considering these difficulties, the thesis focused on the following guiding research question: what are the barriers to the adoption of telemedicine on a large scale in the Brazilian context? To answer the research question, the study proposed to investigate the perception of multiple stakeholders in relation to the barriers to the adoption of telemedicine considering different dimensions, based on the literature review and investigation of the empirical field. The general objective of the work was to identify the barriers to the adoption of telemedicine on a large scale in the context of the Brazilian healthcare market. Among the specific objectives, contextualize the role of telemedicine in the Brazilian health market; identify in the literature barriers to the adoption of new technologies and telemedicine; analyze the perception of multiple stakeholders regarding barriers to adopting telemedicine; categorize the barriers to adopting telemedicine in light of the perception of multiple stakeholders; understand the managerial implications of barriers to the adoption of telemedicine. In order to capture and understand the perception of multiple stakeholders from the market, the method used was the focus group, due to its qualitative approach that allowed the expectations of the objectives proposed in this work to be met. Cultural, financial, regulatory and technological barriers were identified, all of which were broken down into specific points. In cultural terms, the following were identified: lack of tradition, user profile, user experience and low scientific maturity. Regarding financial barriers, the following points were identified: investments, payment rules and lack of monetary incentives. In regulatory barriers, professional associations and the LGPD. In technological barriers, infrastructure, internet quality and technological difficulties emerged. The managerial implications brought propositions on how telemedicine can add value to the healthcare market, highlighting that telemedicine adoption involves all spheres of power in healthcare organizations, in addition to requiring planning, generating new business models with greater capacity for innovation, considering it only as one of the digital health technologies and as a solution for low-complexity medical care in remote regions. Finally, as a democratic type of care, telemedicine must be offered in an accessible way.