Implementation of a Telemedicine Tool in Primary Care for Older Adults

The pandemic has served a major catalyst propelling telehealth to the frontline of health care. For older adults who often live many chronic health problems, telehealth, which means to give medical check-ups by phone, email or by video conferencing, has become a lifeline to accessing a doctor when they need one. Even without the pandemic, telehealth can help ease access to care, especially for those living in rural areas who often need to travel long distances to see a doctor. However, there is a lack of telehealth tools that have been adapted for older patients. For example, only a few studies have looked at how well they work in improving outcomes for older patients like their quality of life, autonomy and use of health services. Telehealth could also lead to unfair differences between urban and rural patients who don't have the same access to technology. All these factors can make it difficult for family doctors to feel confident about using telehealth for their older patients. With telehealth likely to become mainstream for family doctors and older patients even after the pandemic, it is important to support the growing use of telehealth through tools that are adapted for older patients, fair and based on reliable evidence. This project aims to support the shift to telehealth in caring for older people living in the community by implementing and evaluating ESOGER, a telehealth support tool, in family medicine clinics. The ESOGER tool provides s a quick and reliable evaluation of the health and social needs of older patients. It can be done by phone making it accessible for everyone. This tool is expected to give family doctors a standardized and feasible way to determine the health and social needs of their older patients using telehealth which will help improve patients' autonomy, quality of life and health service use. The tool will be tested in four clinics in both urban and rural regions of Quebec to find out if it helped doctors better address their patient