The nature of communication in virtual home care visits.

The study's objective was to analyze "virtual" home care visits that utilize telemedicine technology and to investigate the type and quality of interaction between provider and patient. The setting was the TeleHomeCare Project which provides TV-based videoconferencing. Patients are receiving standard home care services with an addition of virtual visits. 122 virtual visits were reviewed and a content analysis was performed for 30 of these. Time was apportioned among the following categories of communication: assessing the patient's clinical status, promoting compliance, addressing psychosocial issues, general informal talk, education, administrative issues, technical issues, assessing patient satisfaction and ensuring accessibility. The findings indicate that technology does not interfere with but rather enriches the care process. Although there are activities that cannot be conducted in virtual visits, they can address most of the important aspects of care delivery giving strength to the argument that they could in some cases substitute traditional visits.