Designing a model to evaluate the quality of remote clinical decisions

Background: Clinical decision making is an essential process in patient management. Decisions which are made by remote medical consultation (teleconsultation) process, usually are based on the data/information provided by requesting physician. There are different methods to evaluate clinical decisions, as self-evaluation. But there is no model/scale to assess the remote medical decision quality. Objectives: To develop a model for assessing the decision quality of medical teleconsultations. Materials/Patients and Methods: Three phases were designed and executed: 1) qualitative study (interview with experts), 2) literature review, and 3) model refinement (with local experts). Results: After duplicate removal, eight and 17 important items were extracted from interview and literature review, respectively. During three sessions, they were corrected and refined. A model with seven items including: data/information quality, information quantity, existence of non-useful information, organizing and structuring, confidence, and comfort, was developed. Conclusion: Evaluation of users opinion is one of the common method to evaluate telemedicine-based systems. Our model can be used to assess clinician s opinion about remote decision quality or possible challenges and process improvement.