Validation of a patient satisfaction survey of the Teleneurology program in Chile

Telemedicine arises as an attractive intervention for reducing the waiting time for appointments with medical specialists in Chile. Successful implementation of this technology requires safeguarding the patient/clinician trust relationship; however, no studies have been conducted to evaluate quality perception of a telemedicine program in Chile. To assess patient satisfaction with the Teleneurology program at the Hospital Higueras Talcahuano (HHT), addressing patient/clinician trust relationship.

A perception survey was constructed with 23 questions, distributed into 5 key areas (items) of user satisfaction. Its face validity was performed by five neurology specialists from the Teleneurology unit of HHT. The survey was applied to 167 patients of the HHT, recruited between 2018 and 2019, for conducting a pilot cross-sectional descriptive study to assess internal consistency (Cronbach alpha) and reliability (factorial analysis of main components). The survey showed an internal consistency of 0.88. Removing any of the items maintained its reliability in values over 0.8. All items showed point biserial correlations greater than 0.30. Overall, the survey constructed and evaluated in this study showed high internal consistency and reliability values, which will allow its application in further studies of quality assessment of the Teleneurology unit of HHT.