Application of Telemedicine in COVID-19: A Bibliometric Analysis

Telemedicine as a tool that can reduce potential disease spread and fill a gap in healthcare has been increasingly applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many studies have summarized telemedicine's technologies or the diseases' applications. However, these studies were reviewed separately. There is a lack of a comprehensive overview of the telemedicine technologies, application areas, and medical service types.

We aimed to investigate the research direction of telemedicine at COVID-19 and to clarify what kind of telemedicine technology is used in what diseases, and what medical services are provided by telemedicine.

Publications addressing telemedicine in COVID-19 were retrieved from the PubMed database. To extract bibliographic information and do a bi-clustering analysis, we used Bicomb and gCLUTO. The co-occurrence networks of diseases, technology, and healthcare services were then constructed and shown using R-studio and the Gephi tool.

We retrieved 5,224 research papers on telemedicine at COVID-19 distributed among 1460 journals. Most articles were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (166/5,224, 3.18%). The United States published the most articles on telemedicine. The research clusters comprised 6 clusters, which refer to mental health, mhealth, cross-infection control, and self-management of diseases. The network analysis revealed a triple relation with diseases, technologies, and health care services with 303 nodes and 5,664 edges. The entity "delivery of health care" was the node with the highest betweenness centrality at 6,787.79, followed by "remote consultation" (4,395.76) and "infection control" (3,700.50).

The results of this study highlight widely use of telemedicine during COVID-19. Most studies relate to the delivery of health care and mental health services. Technologies were primarily via mobile devices to deliver health care, remote consultation, control infection, and contact tracing. The study assists researchers in comprehending the knowledge structure in this sector, enabling them to discover critical topics and choose the best match for their survey work.