A Preliminary Study Investigating Patients’ Perceptions of Research Consenting Methods
Teleconsent utilizes telemedicine technology to overcome recruitment challenges facing researchers, allowing them to reach patients who cannot travel to complete consent forms. This technology has been evaluated qualitatively, but not using measures associated with the technology acceptance model (TAM). The study outlined below measured perceived usability for the patients across 3 different consent methods: in-person, eConsent, and teleconsent. A between-subject experimental design used in this study where 10 nursing students acted as providers and 30 participants as patients. The 10 providers collected consent from the 30 patients in each of the three conditions. There were no statistically significant differences in the usability, presence, or workload of the three consent methods. Our results showed that it is practical and effective to use eConsent and teleconsent to collect consent from patients as they perceived them to be just as functional as the in-person consent collection.