Brazilian dental teleconsulting: dentist satisfaction and associated factors

Teleconsulting consists of communication between professionals about clinical matters using information and communication technologies. Satisfaction is an important outcome in the evaluation of telehealth programs and an indicator of the effectiveness of the services offered. This cross-sectional study evaluated dentist satisfaction with asynchronous dental teleconsulting services offered by the Telehealth Brazil Networks Program and associated factors during 2020, using a secondary database: the Monitoring and Evaluation System of Telehealth Results. The outcome was the satisfaction of the dentist with the response of the teleconsulting session. The other variables collected were the dentist's sex and specialty, the time at which the question and answer of the teleconsulting session were submitted, patient referral, and the dental specialty addressed in the teleconsulting session. The variables were analyzed descriptively using frequency, and binary logistic regression models were used to measure the association between satisfaction and factors related to the dentist and the teleconsulting service. A total of 1,719 dental teleconsulting sessions were conducted. A 26.7% satisfaction level was achieved. Satisfaction with teleconsulting was indicated by the association between professionals declaring that dental teleconsulting "avoided referrals" (OR =1.55, 95%CI: 1.17-2.04, p = 0.002) and the teleconsulting sessions in the field of oral medicine (OR = 0.61, 95%CI: 0.43-0.87, p = 0.006). Dentists' satisfaction with asynchronous dental teleconsulting was low. Dentists reporting that teleconsulting avoided patient referrals to other care levels were more likely to be satisfied with the answer from the teleconsultant. Moreover, dentists who submitted oral medicine-related questions were significantly less satisfied with the teleconsulting feedback than those who submitted questions regarding other fields.