**1. Introduction**

COVID-19 and related precautions have affected various healthcare services that have been either temporarily closed or transitioned to virtual care delivery and have placed substantial stress on healthcare providers. Therefore, using telehealth technologies and its policy incentivizing is an emergent need now more than ever. While work demands have varied, it is very important to examine the usability of telehealth implementation and services in Saudi Arabia during COVID-19. The combination of higher costs for the acquisition of personal protective equipment and an increased number of health providers testing positive has created a strain on the healthcare workforce [1]. Frontline healthcare providers have been reporting increased symptoms of anxiety and depression related to burnout, and fatigue and chronic concern for lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) [2]. The demand for care is relatively consistent; however, this pandemic has created

**Citation:** Alzahrani, M.G.; Zakari, N.M.A.; Abuabah, D.I.; Ousman, M.S.; Xu, J.; Hamadi, H.Y. Examining Healthcare Professionals' Telehealth Usability before and during COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia: A Cross-Sectional Study. *Nurs. Rep.* **2022**, *12*, 648–654. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/nursrep12030064

Academic Editor: Richard Gray

Received: 23 July 2022 Accepted: 30 August 2022 Published: 3 September 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/).

a surge in the need for care in select healthcare delivery specialties, forcing other nonurgent or elective care to halt or transition to telehealth [3]. Even with the slowdown or in some cases halting of elective surgeries [4–6], millions of individuals with chronic diseases or non-COVID-19 illnesses still required access to care [4,7]. COVID-19 has created the need for 'social distancing' [8,9] to slow the spread of the virus, thus reducing the ability to provide in-person healthcare services. This forced distancing made telehealth an ideal modality to deliver necessary care [10]. Telehealth technologies group synchronous (phone and video) and asynchronous (store and forward such as patient portals) communication and virtual agents (telemonitoring through wearable devices); all of these activities allow the delivery of care and the interaction of provider-to-patient or provider-to-provider [11]. During these strenuous times, the need for telehealth services has pushed many organizations to expand their telehealth capabilities to serve patients while maintaining their safety at home [12].

However, most organizations and professions were not telehealth ready before the pandemic, causing staff resistance and lack of utilization of this technology within the interprofessional setting when it was needed most [13]. The lack of prior utilization of this technology is not the only challenge, but also several challenges are encountered in the usage and uptake of telehealth. These include digital illiteracy, technology, and internet access, gender, age, rural location, and low-income patients [14,15]. For telehealth to be effective during a healthcare crisis, we must rapidly understand how such technologies are being utilized and integrated into models of care. Therefore, this study aims to understand how healthcare providers, telehealth utilization, and interprofessional interactions were affected during COVID-19.
