Latvian primary care physicians’ attitudes and intentions to use telemedicine in daily practice

Objectives
Telemedicine includes communication via e-mail, online messaging platforms, video calls and phone calls. The aim of this study was to explore the attitudes of family doctors in Latvia towards the use of telemedicine in daily practice during consultations with their patients, using the PAIT questionnaire (Physicians’ Attitudes and Intentions to use Telemedicine), created in Sweden in 2019.
Materials and Methods
A descriptive, cross-sectional on-line study, September-December 2024. The anonymous questionnaire was distributed to 500 practicing Latvian family doctors of various ages and years of experience, and analysed using descriptive statistics.
Results
In total, 200 questionnaires were completed (40% response rate). Only 30 respondents (15%) declared that they keep themselves up-to-date with healthcare digital tool development. Reported use of telemedicine depended
on the modality: 99 respondents (49.5%) had used video consultations at least once, 161 respondents (80.5%) used chat platforms, 189 respondents (94.5%) used e-mails and 190 respondents (95%) used text messages in their everyday work.
Respondents were asked to evaluate their opinion of using different consultation methods using a Likert scale (1=“not using at all”, 7= “using very much”). Use of face-to-face consultations had a mean overall score of 6.55, while, use of video consultations had a much lower score of 2.38. Only 19 respondents (9.5%) felt experienced in monitoring chronic diseases using digital tools, while 29 respondents (14.5%) stated they have no experience of this at all, with an overall mean score of 3.99. Regarding video consultations, 39 respondents (19.5%) strongly disagreed that if they had the opportunity they would use this in their daily work, but 52 respondents (26%) stated they would use digital tools more often for monitoring chronic diseases.
Conclusions
Our data suggest that the use of different digital contact methods is in common use among Latvian family doctors, while monitoring chronic diseases using digital tools is little used.