Table 2

Themes extracted from included publications with exemplar quotes

Construct	Theme	Frequency (n)	Exemplar quote
Perceived effectiveness	Potential utility	18	‘This tool would be useful to frontline health workers because they activate neurosurgery teams. If there is uncertainty, the frontline workers may take their time before calling the neurosurgery team, causing a delay. This could help reduce that time to activate [the neurosurgery] team’43
	Observed success	15	‘Where is my patient?” because it’s so often wrong that there’s no point in me going to the board [to find] where my patient is’47
	Patient accessibility	12	‘I mean, you got like a 75-year-old guy with colon cancer, and he can’t like get on MyChart and figure, he doesn’t have a smartphone to use and all this different stuff’37
Affective attitude	Optimism	15	‘I think it could really benefit and help us be compliant…’44
	Open-mindedness	4	‘(W)ould certainly be willing to give it a go’40
	Scepticism	8	‘I think less than 10% of my patients would I be able to do anything, I’d think, worthwhile with telemedicine’37
	Apprehension	10	‘I thought they were in this place and I thought they were doing this and exercise z and I saw them and they were worse than I thought they were. That has also frightened people—therapists I guess, thinking that, oh I thought they were better’46
	Indifference	1	‘I’m not hurt by not getting the text message. It doesn’t change anything. It’s like extra peas for dinner; if it’s there, it’s there; if not, it’s fine’47
Opportunity costs	Efficiency	15	‘It’s faster, it’s efficient, we use less resources than clinic…’36
	Patient safety	9	‘Most worrisome is how long it sometimes takes for messages to be delivered—it has caused many mis- communications, arguments and delays in care’45
	Data privacy and security	5	‘I think there would be a part of just assuring that it was all HIPAA-compliant and that there weren't any concerns about…information being able to be hacked’44
Ethicality	Beneficence	9	‘You can better supervise patients’ self-management on the long-term, remind them what they can do themselves and control their training’51
	Non-maleficence	7	‘In addition, the inability to carry out a heart and lung examination and take specific patient measurements were also considered limiting factors that could create problems during surgery’36
	Autonomy	6	‘We are giving back that locus of control to the patient’42
	Justice	6	‘There was a recognition that different individuals would have different access to resources’46 ‘Potential for elderly/low socioeconomic groups to have difficulty with technology…’49
Burden	Cost	7	‘Well for both the hospital and the client it would be financial, so cost input would be a key consideration’40
	Increased workload	6	‘I think e-consultations are helpful, but when they add to the workload and we get ten per week, then we have to assign someone to do them because [it is] too much work for those at the clinic’35
	Need for user training	6	‘It’s not just as easy as sitting in front of camera and both ends and away you go, there’s probably a significant amount of learning on how to do that effectively’40
Intervention coherence	Simplicity of intervention	12	‘The clarity and brevity of the tool was a facilitator to its use in clinical practice’52
Self-efficacy	Prerequisites for use	10	‘I need to work with it more regularly to get more confident’51