Improving Quality of Care for Patients Receiving Care through Telehealth in the Time of COVID-19 Global Pandemic and Beyond: HCI-based Leading Indicators for Virtual Visits

The COVID-19 pandemic expedited the growing rate of reliance on telehealth, as it provided a safer option for patients to seek the care they need and avoid potential negative consequences of being exposed to the COVID-19 virus. The aim of this study is to develop a series of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)-based leading indicators to proactively analyze and evaluate the user interface in telehealth and virtual visits. Building on Nielsen's usability heuristics and mapping them to the six aspects of quality of care introduced by the Institute of Medicine, we identified the design features that had the highest impact on the quality of care and developed a list of leading indicators for each feature. Further, we developed corresponding checklists for each leading indicator to evaluate the features of the user. Beyond the benefits of telehealth for both patients and healthcare providers during atypical circumstances, the changes prompted by the COVID-19 public health emergency have possibly altered the position of telehealth to the point that communicating through video and audio has become the new normal. Therefore, the importance of designing an interface to facilitate user interaction with the system and consequently with one another is of utmost importance.