**1. Introduction**

Currently, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) plays a significant role in all industries and people's everyday lives. The healthcare field is no exception. Medical institutions have been using advanced ICT for health records, telemedicine, various forms of e-learning, as well as other tools. The increasing accessibility to the internet and smart devices has influenced the use of applications and implementation of telemedicine in healthcare [1].

One of the concepts used in today's health care is video-conferencing [2]. Videoconferencing is often described in different terms, such as video meetings [3], digital/virtual meetings, digital visits [4], or video teleconferencing [5]. The concept is rather broad. It includes consultations not only between patients and healthcare professionals [6] but also consultations between two or more healthcare professionals. In which a patient and a healthcare professional are present, on a clinical site or in the home, and together they are consulted by an included specialist from another clinical site [7,8]. So, the consultation may be referred to as video-conferencing [9,10], even though it is broader than just patient-to-healthcare professional consultations. In this review, a narrower concept of video-conferencing is considered central, which is video consultations initiated by patients consulted by health care professionals. This type of consultation is referred to differently in the literature; virtual visits [11], telehealth which can mean both telephone and video consultations [12,13], digital visits, or video consultations [13], to name a few.

It is important to note that the use of video visits has increased due to both its advantages, such as providing timely care to patients in rural areas or homebound chronically

**Citation:** Lampickiene, I.; ˙ Davoody, N. Healthcare Professionals' Experience of Performing Digital Care Visits— A Scoping Review. *Life* **2022**, *12*, 913. https://doi.org/10.3390/ life12060913

Academic Editor: Daniele Giansanti

Received: 6 May 2022 Accepted: 16 June 2022 Published: 17 June 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

ill patients, and the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic has not been the only factor driving the adoption of digital care visits, it still played a significant role in the process. Due to the widespread infection, most countries implemented public restrictions and recommendations such as minimizing or banning gatherings, countrywide lockdowns, social distancing, wearing protective masks, and paying special attention to hand hygiene to control the contagion [14]. The infection rates increased exponentially during the first and second waves of the pandemic, and there were large numbers of severely ill patients that needed immediate hospitalization and even intensive care [14]. This resulted in an unusually high workload for the healthcare sector; multiple hospital wards were transformed into COVID-19 wards due to the shortage of beds in intensive care units [15–17]. The situation was so severe that routine visits and other non-emergency procedures had to be postponed, prioritizing COVID-19 patients [14,17].

On account of the circumstances, health care institutions were required to rapidly adopt and implement digital care visits in their practice to be able to provide telemedicine services [18,19]. The urgency of the situation sped up the process of authorization and regulation regarding legal matters such as new payment models for remote health care services and health information privacy [19]. Digital care visits got implemented in various areas of health care—primary care, mental health [20,21], orthopedic care [22], neurology [18,23,24], palliative care [25], pharmacy [26], dentistry [27], and others. Even though digital care visits do not provide possibilities for physical examinations where a healthcare professional would need to examine a patient physically, video consultations allow specialists to evaluate and sometimes diagnose by inspecting the patient through video. The pandemic has brought massive challenges and burdens to this world. Still, it also stimulated people to adapt and seek quick and creative solutions, speeding up technology implementation in different areas, including the health care sector.

Some research has been done regarding the use of video conferencing, implementation issues, policies, etc. [11], along with patients' experiences and perceptions of using videoconferencing for healthcare visits [6,28–30]. However, the number of studies on healthcare professionals' experience with patient-initiated digital visits is limited.

A broader overview, including healthcare professionals from different specializations and the latest literature, could contribute to a better understanding of what is known on this topic, what the research gaps are, and what should be studied more. Finding out what the benefits and challenges of using digital care visits are from the healthcare professionals' perspective could help optimize the service for both health workers and patients. Thus making it safer and more usable, resulting in higher satisfaction with the service as well as more efficient use of limited healthcare staff resources.
