Systematic review of teleneurology: neurohospitalist neurology.
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Date
2013-10-29
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Abstract
The use of 2 way audiovisual telemedicine technology for the delivery of acute stroke care is well established in the literature and is a growing practice The use of such technology for neurologic consultation outside the cerebrovascular specialty has been reported to a variable extent across most disciplines within the field of neurology including that of the neurohospitalist medicine A systematic review of these reports is lacking Hence the main purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the literature on teleneurologic consultation in hospital neurology The databases Ovid MEDLINE EMBASE PsychINFO CINAHL and Cochrane were used as data sources and were searched with key words teleneurology and its numerous synonyms and cognates These key words were cross referenced with subspecialties of neurology The studies were included for further review only if the title or the abstract indicated that the study made use of 2 way audiovisual communication to address a neurologic indication This search yielded 6625 abstracts By consensus between the 2 investigators 688 publications met the criteria for inclusion and further review Four of those citations directly pertained to the inpatient hospital neurologic consultation Each of the 4 relevant articles was scored with a novel rubric scoring functionality application technology and evaluation phase A subspecialty category score was calculated by averaging those scores The use of 2 way audiovisual technology for general neurologic consultation of hospital inpatients beyond stroke related care is promising but the evidence supporting its routine use is weak Further studies on reliability validity safety efficacy and cost effectiveness are encouraged