Impact and future of telemedicine amidst the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review of the state-of-the-art in Latin America

Abstract

Significant progress has been made in using information and communication tech-nologies in medicine, by impacting the quality of health-care delivery system and patient care, and paving the way for ground-breaking tools for e-health and clinical decision-support sys-tems. This study investigates the extent to which the evolution of telemedicine applications has been used to support patient care in Latin America (LATAM) amidst the pandemic. Theoreti-cally, the study applied the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology to identify the impact of telemedicine in the region. Practically, the paper provides a systematic mapping study of the different domain areas and methodological progress in Telemedicine that occurred during the pandemic, and applied a text mining technique to understand the intensities of the terms expressed by the analyzed studies. The results show that while tele-medicine has not been extensively used, a greater percentage of the studies report that telemedicine was effective. Approximately 70% positive emotional valence score was found. The paper also provides an empirical discussion and recommendations for the next steps in ample adoption of telemedicine.