PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
To investigate the attitude of primary care physicians to the use of remote monitoring of health parameters in dispensary observation of patients with chronic non-infectious diseases.
MATERIAL AND METHODS
A questionnaire was conducted among doctors at 6 polyclinics in Bryansk using a specially developed questionnaire to assess the attitude to the introduction of telemedicine technologies for remote monitoring of the health parameters of patients undergoing dispensary observation. All respondents were doctors of primary health care, whose tasks include conducting dispensary observation of chronic patients, including using remote technologies. A self-completion questionnaire was used.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Satisfactory awareness of doctors in the effectiveness of the use of technologies for remote monitoring of blood pressure (BP) was revealed. The majority of respondents believe that the most preferable target group for using the remote monitoring method is young patients who work and take antihypertensive drugs. Doctors are ready to spend 40 minutes on average during their working hours for remote monitoring of patients with hypertension. The survey made it possible to identify barriers and obstacles that, according to doctors, may arise with the possible widespread introduction of dispensary observation with remote control of blood pressure. The majority of responders (80.6%) named lack of time as barriers, 44.1% — economic reasons (cost of equipment), 39.8% — difficulties in teaching patients, 15.0% indicated the difficulty of analyzing observation results.
CONCLUSION
The data obtained confirm the assumption that now primary care doctors are suspicious of the prospect of widespread introduction of remote dispensary observation: the overwhelming majority of responders have no personal experience in conducting such monitoring and predict a lack of time for it, along with this interest in new technology is quite high — about 1/2 of the responders are ready to start remote monitoring in the short term.