Brave new world demands a new level of care: an international assessment model for quality and safety in remote appointments published

It's great to see a doctor right away, even from the comfort of your own home. No need to travel, find a parking space or scramble for childcare. Remote consultations, symptom assessments and other digital services are freeing healthcare from time and place in ways we only dreamed of a few years ago. At the same time, they are being fitted with the cape of the hero as the saviour of healthcare. But I teach my children that if something sounds too good to be true, it is usually not the whole truth.

Old ways of evaluating service don't always fit the new

The new way of delivering healthcare also creates new concerns, threats and things to consider. For years, we have been honing the safety of our primary care practices. We have successfully drawn on lessons from aviation, for example, where checklists that have rocketed flight safety have found their way into operating theatres around the world.

While other areas of life have been using a variety of digital services for years, healthcare is a world of its own. You can return the wrong size shirt bought online, but what about the treatment you get from a digital service? It's nice to have a video call with your grandmother from time to time, and you can hear what's going on with everyone else in the background. But what about a telemedicine appointment?

There is a huge number of issues to consider from a quality and safety perspective. Although medicine is the same remotely as it is in the present, the way you encounter it affects many things. A responsible healthcare provider takes the provision of new services seriously and systematically seeks to identify all aspects. This is by no means an easy task.

WHO publishes a tool for evaluating remote health appointments

Fortunately, everyone is in exactly the same situation. That's why the World Health Organization (WHO) took up the collective challenge and developed a tool to help healthcare providers systematically assess the quality and safety of their telehealth services, especially from the patient's perspective.

The tool assesses:

• Patient-centredness, including customer experience and ease of use of services
• Monitoring effectiveness, i.e. how the benefits to the patient are monitored; and
• Service security, such as the implementation of data protection and security, and the service management model.

Challenge accepted!

At Terveystalo, we accepted the challenge as soon as it came up. As a large national operator, we wanted to test the evaluation tool in a Finnish environment. We found that many things were at an excellent level.

We also found room for improvement. We have gone to great lengths to ensure that our services are easy to use and reliable. But we can do even more to support our customers in their digital literacy. We will continue to offer support and guidance on, for example, the best environment in which to participate in remote consultations. We are also listening carefully to our customers' feedback on our advice and will continue to improve it.

A systematic, comprehensive and honest assessment of health services helped to make the experience even smoother and we would like to see all providers adopt this tool. It is not perfect, of course, but it will certainly get better the more people use it.