Aim: The primary study aim was to evaluate the successful completion rate of pre-treatment medication history consults by pharmacists with patients and support people using (a) standard care unscheduled telephone consults, compared to (b) scheduled videoconference consults. Secondary aims were to examine pharmacist perceptions of telephone consults, as well as patient, support person, and pharmacist perceptions of videoconference consults.
Methods: Telephone and videoconference consult data was collected and compared for each modality. A successfully completed telephone or videoconference consult was defined as a medication history being completed prior to treatment day without an additional face-to-face consult being required. After each telephone consult, pharmacists were asked to document comments about any issues that arose during the consult. A subset of patients, support people and pharmacists were asked to complete a post-consult survey following videoconferencing consults. Participant feedback was analysed using content analysis.
Results: Of the 105 unscheduled telephone consults 72% (n=76) were successful. In comparison, of the 81 scheduled videoconference consults, 94% (n=76) were successful, hence the videoconference model achieved a significantly higher completion rate (p<0.0001). Pharmacist comments from the telephone consults described issues such as ‘inconvenient time of call’, ‘technical issues’, and ‘unable to confirm details of medicines’. Following videoconference consults, 22 patient and support person and 17 pharmacist surveys were completed. All patient and support people responses and 82% of pharmacist responses reported satisfaction with videoconferencing. Pharmacists described some ‘technical issues’ but positive features e.g. ‘ability to view medicines containers and/or labels’. Patient and support people reported ‘technical issues’ and also benefits e.g. ‘videoconference ease of use.’
Conclusion: Compared to telephone consults, videoconference consults had a statistically significantly higher completion rate and were conducted with overall high satisfaction. Further investigation into facilitators and barriers of conducting videoconference consults is required to inform service sustainability.