Feasibility study and determination of prerequisites of telecare programme to enhance patient management in lung transplantation: a qualitative study from the perspective of Iranian healthcare providers

BACKGROUND: Non-adherence to treatment plans, follow-up visits and healthcare advice is a common obstacle in the management of lung transplant patients. This study aims to investigate experts’ views on the needs and main aspects of telecare programmes for lung transplantation. DESIGN: A qualitative study incorporating an inductive thematic analysis. SETTING: Lung transplant clinic and thoracic research centre. PARTICIPANTS: Clinicians: four pulmonologists, two cardiothoracic surgeons, two general physicians, two pharmacotherapists, one cardiologist, one nurse and one medical informatician. METHOD: This study adopted a focus group discussion technique to gather experts’ opinions on the prerequisites and features of a telecare programme in lung transplantation. All interviews were coded and combined into main categories and themes. Thematic analysis was performed to extract the key concepts using ATLAS.Ti. Ultimately, all extracted themes were integrated to devise a conceptual model. RESULTS: Ten focus groups with 13 participants were conducted. Forty-six themes and subthemes were extracted through the thematic analysis. The main features of the final programme were extracted from expert opinions through thematic analysis, such as continuous monitoring of symptoms, drug management, providing a specific care plan for each patient, educating patients module, creating an electronic medical record to collect patient information, equipping the system with decision support tools, smart electronic prescription and the ability to send messages to the care team. The prerequisites of the system were summarised in self-care activities, clinician’s tasks and required technologies. In addition, the barriers and benefits of using a telecare system to enhance the quality of care were determined. CONCLUSION: Our investigation recognised the main factors that must be considered to design a telecare programme to provide ideal continuous care for lung transplant patients. Users should further explore the proposed model to support the development of telecare interventions at the point of care.