Understanding Barriers to Telemedicine Implementation in Rural Emergency Departments

Telemedicine has potential to add value to the delivery of emergency care in rural emergency departments (EDs); however, previous work suggests that it may be underused. We seek to understand barriers to telemedicine implementation in rural EDs, and to describe characteristics of rural EDs that do and do not use telemedicine.

We performed a secondary analysis of data from the 2016 National Emergency Department Inventory survey, identifying rural EDs that did and did not use telemedicine in 2016. All rural EDs that did not use telemedicine were administered a follow-up survey asking about ED staffing, transfer patterns, and perceived barriers to telemedicine use. We used a similar instrument to survey a sample of EDs that did use telemedicine, but we replaced the question about barriers with questions related to telemedicine use. Data are presented with descriptive statistics.

We identified 977 rural EDs responding to the 2016 National Emergency Department Inventory-USA survey; 453 (46%; 95% confidence interval 43% to 50%) did not use telemedicine. Among rural nonusers, 374 EDs (83%; 95% confidence interval 79% to 86%) responded to our second survey. Of the 177 rural EDs using telemedicine that we surveyed, 153 responded (86%; 95% confidence interval 80% to 91%). Among rural EDs not using telemedicine, 235 (67%) reported that their ED, hospital, or health system leadership had considered it. Cost was the most commonly cited reason for lack of adoption (n=86; 37%).

Among US rural EDs, cost is a commonly reported barrier that may be limiting the extent of telemedicine adoption.