52% of Providers Say Patients Declined Telehealth Due to Security Concerns

Though the popularity of telehealth has grown over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of global telehealth providers have experienced cases where patients refused to participate in a virtual visit either because they do not trust the technology or due to privacy or data concerns, according to a new survey.

Commissioned by Kaspersky and conducted by Arlington Research, the survey includes results from 389 interviews, of which 170 were completed with enterprises that have more than 1,000 employees. The survey was conducted across 34 countries.

Survey results confirmed the widespread use of telehealth worldwide, with 91 percent of medical providers saying they have already started using telehealth. About 44 percent of respondents said they started using telehealth after the pandemic began, while 21 percent said they started using it less than a year before the onset of the public health emergency.

In fact, about 13 percent of providers have switched completely to online consultations on a regular basis and almost a half (46 percent) are likely to do so in the future.

The most popular virtual care modality is synchronous telehealth, that is real-time, live video or voice calls, with half (51 percent) saying they are using this modality, closely followed by remote patient monitoring via wearables (41 percent), and asynchronous telehealth (39 percent), which involves technology that collects and stores patient data for a healthcare professional to retrieve at a later time.

But 52 percent of telehealth providers reported having patients who refused a virtual visit citing mistrust in technology or concerns about privacy and data safety.

Clinicians, too, have concerns, with 81 percent saying that they are uncertain about how patient data will be used and shared from these virtual sessions. They also expressed concerns about data security and the personal penalties that may arise if data is leaked.

Further, 34 percent of telehealth providers agreed that one or more clinicians in their organization have made a wrong diagnosis because of poor video or photo quality.

Approximately 29 percent said their clinicians have shared data with third parties for medical or marketing research using an email attachment without a password, and 54 percent said that some of their clinicians conduct remote sessions using apps that are not specifically designed for medical care, such as FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, and Zoom.

Around a third of respondents (30 percent) also said that some of their clinicians have had patient data compromised during remote care sessions.

"Trust has always been important to the healthcare sector, but today as more and more medical organizations rely on technology and digital offerings to support their services, patients also want to feel confident about the privacy of their medical data," said Evgeniya Naumova, executive vice president of corporate business at Kaspersky, in a news release. "That means the level of trust within the industry is inextricably linked to a provider's ability to ensure the safety of the sensitive information they collect, share, and store."

In addition to the issue of patient mistrust is providers' own fears about the cybersecurity efforts of their organization. Only 30 percent of respondents reported being very confident that their organization can effectively stop all cyberattacks and breaches.

About 33 percent of respondents said that their organizations have faced problems like data leaks, distributed denial-of-service attacks, or ransomware attacks due to vulnerabilities in third-party technologies.

But, despite the potential security risks, 71 percent of respondents said that telehealth will add the most value to the healthcare sector in the next five years as compared with any other technology.