Telemedicine adoption from the perspective of healthcare providers: barriers and challenges

Objectives Telemedicine is a fast-growing branch of medicine mainly in the last decade. The main goal of telemedicine services is to sustain the capacity and ensure access to medical services for all patients, without jeopardizing the safety of the healthcare providers nor the patients. Along with the benefits that telemedicine system offers, still there are many barriers to its adoption. The aim of the current study was to demonstrate barriers to adopt telemedicine in Jordan from the perspective of healthcare providers. Methods The method employed was a questionnaire-based survey, which piloted and tested for validity and reliability. A voluntary random sampling approach was employed. A total of 425 responses were collected. The inclusion criteria were healthcare professionals with age of 22 years and above, and willing to participate in the survey. Participants were asked to fill in an online survey and data attained were treated confidentially. Comparison and descriptive statistics were used to report the results. Key findings The financial, information technology and technology, awareness-related, and legal barriers had a significant linear correlation with telemedicine adoption. The overall Pearson’s correlation was strong (0.32–0.42). The higher significance was assigned to the awareness-related barrier with a t-value of (5.65). Conclusions Telemedicine is relatively a new concept in Jordan, hence, there are still hurdles and critics. The current study indicated that the digitalization of our health sector is limited by legal, financial, technological, and awareness-related barriers. The awareness-related barrier was identified as the most critical barrier.