Telehealth is an integral part of healthcare. Exposure to telehealth education is essential for both students and health care professionals to support its effective adoption and appropriate utilization. This scoping review aims to explore whether and which telehealth competencies are being assessed and the methods used to evaluate them among health care professionals and students.
Methods:
An electronic literature search was performed using six electronic databases between January 2024 and February 2025. We included studies where telehealth competencies or their components were evaluated by some type of tool (validated or researcher created). Strict inclusion and exclusion criteria were used, and each article was evaluated by at least two reviewers.
Results:
Out of 1,217 articles screened by title and abstract, 75 met inclusion criteria, with 36 of those selected for inclusion in this review. Participants were evaluated mostly by researcher-created tools that lacked psychometric properties or adapted nontelehealth evaluation tools. Few validated/reliable tools directly measured telehealth competencies.
Discussion:
The results of this review illustrate there exists a lack of available validated/reliable evaluation tools to appraise telehealth competencies. Few studies included an evaluation of all telehealth competencies but rather focused only on communication and technology proficiency; none evaluated the appropriate use of telehealth or digital disparities.
Conclusions:
More research is needed to develop validated telehealth evaluation tools that can be used across disciplines and encompass all telehealth competencies. Additionally, true research methods are needed to adequately assess the impact of telehealth education on the performance and confidence of learners.
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