A recently published study of clinicians’ mass exposure to telehealth during the COVID pandemic was published in the Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science. In reviewing the literature on working from home and COVID’s impact on behavioral health practices, the research team used “clinician technophobia” as a “provocative term that invites clinicians to engage in honest self-reflection.” They then asked, “Are you avoiding technology based on your evaluation of the empirical research or your own worries about using it?” Led by Andrew Sherril, the research team reviewed the available literature and proposed a salient model to address clinical technophobia using exposure therapy.
Context of Pre-COVID Clinical Technophobia
The researchers cite research describing clinicians’ negative attitudes and worries as one of the most significant barriers to telehealth adoption and implementation. The concept of the inevitability of healthcare’s urgent need to adapt to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2016) provides a backdrop for introducing a detailed approach to increasing clinician comfort with using technology. They explain how clinicians can use an exposure therapy model to change their beliefs about technology adoption,
Clinicians are encouraged to consider that before COVID, technology had already been changing mental health services profoundly (Reger, 2020). They are reminded that COVID did not introduce new technologies but rather introduced new reasons for using the technology already available in the marketplace (Drude, 2021). After offering a detailed literature review, the researchers then present their perspective of the inevitability that the future of clinical work rests with increased comfort with using technology in clinical settings.
They posited that the mass transition to telehealth at the beginning of COVID “functioned as an exposure exercise that changed many clinicians’ cognitive and emotional reactions to the use of telehealth technologies.” They then suggested ways clinicians might persist with increasing their exposure to learning more about using…
