Facilitators and challenges in the adoption of a virtual nurse visit in the home health setting

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity to incorporate nurse-led virtual home care visits into heart failure patients’ plan of care. As a supplemental nurse visit to traditional in-person home visits, the Virtual Nurse Visit (VNV) service was deployed using Zoom teleconferencing technology enabling telehealth nurses to remotely communicate, assess, and educate their patients. This mixed methods study explored heart failure patients’ abilities, experience, and satisfaction to use and adopt a virtual nurse visit. Sociodemographic, semi-structured interview questions, and the System Usability Scale data were collected. Thirty-four participants completed the study. Over half of participants perceived the VNV usable and four qualitative themes emerged: perceived safety during COVID-19, preferences for care delivery, user experiences and challenges, and satisfaction with the VNV service. Findings from this study builds the science around telehealth that will inform future studies examining this type of nurse-led virtual visit and subsequent patient outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual care
• home health
• nursing
• telehealth

Acknowledgments

ChristianaCare HomeHealth Leadership team: Ann Painter, MSN, RN; Rita Elentrio, MSN, RN; Lori Davis-Palmer, MSN, RN, COS-C; Leslie Kaczmarczyk, RN, BS, COS-C

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Delaware Accelerating Clinical and Translation Research (ACCEL), and Institutional Development Aware (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant number U54-GM104941, with additional support from the State of Delaware.