Outpatients’ Opinion And Experience Regarding Telepharmacy During The COVID-19 Pandemic: The Enopex Project

BACKGROUND: Telepharmacy, as a remote pharmaceutical care procedure, is being used worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of preserving the health of patients and professionals. Its future development should incorporate the assessment of patient perception, but no research study has investigated it. OBJECTIVE: The objective was to poll the opinions and experiences of outpatients with telepharmacy through a purpose-developed questionnaire and to assess it’s quality through an internal validity and reliability analysis. METHODS: Cross-sectional observational study of adult patients who used telepharmacy services during the COVID-19 lockdown period in Spain. The subjects answered a 24-item questionnaire, after giving their informed consent. Place of delivery, informed pharmacotherapeutic follow-up, opinion about telepharmacy, future development, ethics/satisfaction, and coordination constituted the six questionnaire categories. After assessing the adequate sample size with the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin test, the Bartlett sphericity test analyzed the validity of the questionnaire. The intraclass correlation coefficient and Cronbach’s α coefficient calculations verified the reliability and internal consistency. RESULTS: A total of 9442 interviews were administered to patients from 81 hospitals, of which 8079 were valid (52.8% female). A 54.1% were aged between 41–65 years; 42.7% had been in treatment for more than 5 years; 42.8% lived between 6–31 miles from the hospital. As many as 96.7% of patients were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with telepharmacy, 97.5% considering it complementary to their usual follow-up; 55.9% expressed a preference for being followed up face to face when visiting the hospital. 75.6% said they had rather receive their medication at home. The sample size obtained was deemed appropriate [the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin test (0.789) and Bartlett’s sphericity test (p<0.005)]. The reliability analysis resulted in a Cronbach α = 0.7. CONCLUSION: Patients have shown high satisfaction with telepharmacy and the ENOPEX questionnaire is a tool with sufficient validity and reliability to be used in the evaluation of the care that patients receive through telepharmacy.