National Estimates of Workplace Telehealth Use Among Emergency Nurses and All Registered Nurses in the United States

The goal of this research was to quantify the baseline status of prepandemic workplace emergency nursing telehealth as a key consideration for ongoing telehealth growth and sustainable emergency nursing care model planning. The purpose of this research was to: (1) generate national estimates of prepandemic workplace telehealth use among emergency and other inpatient hospital nurses and (2) map the geographic distribution of prepandemic workplace emergency nurse telehealth use by state of nurse residence.

We generated national estimates using data from the 2018 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses. Data were analyzed using jack-knife estimation procedures coherent with the complex sampling design selected as representative of the population and requiring analysis with survey weights.

Weighted estimates of the 161 865 emergency nurses, compared with 1 191 287 other inpatient nurses revealed more reported telehealth in the workplace setting (49% vs 34%) and individual clinical practice telehealth use (36% vs 15%) among emergency nurses. The geographic distribution of individual clinical practice emergency nurse telehealth use indicates greatest adoption per 10 000 state residents in Maine, Alaska, and Missouri with more states in the Midwest demonstrating emergency nurse adoption of telehealth into clinical practice per population than other regions in the United States.

By quantifying prepandemic national telehealth use, the results provide corroborating evidence to the potential long-term adoptability and sustainability of telenursing in the emergency nursing specialty. The results also implicate the need to proactively define emergency nursing telehealth care model standards of practice, nurse competencies, and reimbursement.