A Review of Patient Satisfaction and Experience with Telemedicine: A Virtual Solution During and Beyond COVID-19 Pandemic

<b>Introduction:</b> This article reviews the studies examining patients' perspective toward telemedicine and their preference for virtual health care services. <b>Methods:</b> An electronic literature search using PubMed was conducted to identify relevant research studies published between December 2019 and August 2020. Twenty-five studies were selected out of 1,041 studies based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, which highlight patients' satisfaction and experience with the use of telemedicine during the pandemic. <b>Results:</b> The findings based upon 48,144 surveyed patients and 146 providers in 12 different countries revealed high satisfaction with virtual encounters across a spectrum of diseases. Telemedicine was found satisfactory on various outcome measures, such as addressing patients' concerns, communication with health care providers, usefulness, and reliability. Most common advantages were time saved due to lesser traveling and waiting time, better accessibility, convenience, and cost efficiency. Age and sex did not significantly impact the satisfaction levels. Physicians and patients both showed a strong preference for continued usage and agreed upon telemedicine's potential to complement the regular health care services even after the pandemic. Technical challenges (reported in 10 studies) and lack of physical examination (reported in 13 studies) were the main limitations encountered in virtual visits. <b>Conclusions:</b> Long-term sustainability of telemedicine for all socioeconomic classes requires closer scrutiny of issues such as technology, training, reimbursement, data privacy, legal guidelines, and framework. Telemedicine must be adopted as a proactive strategy and scaled-up even beyond emergency usage due to its immense potential in complementing conventional health care services, such as diagnosis, treatment, follow-up, surveillance, and infection control.