Telehome palliative care improves access and continuity, but success hinges on digital readiness, review finds

An integrative review of 33 studies, structured using Normalisation Process Theory, examined telehealth-supported home palliative care [Synthesis]. It found that telehome-based models improve access to specialist support and continuity of symptom management, but that success depends on patients’ and carers’ digital literacy, caregiver burden, and the readiness of the delivering organisation to embed the technology into routine practice.

As a structured review across 33 studies rather than a single trial, this offers a more consolidated evidence base than any individual telehealth pilot, while retaining the explicit implementation caveats that individual pilots often omit.

Telehome palliative care is a genuinely evidence-supported option for extending specialist symptom-management support to patients who would otherwise depend on travel-dependent specialist contact, particularly relevant for dispersed rural populations — but the review’s own digital-exclusion caveat means it cannot be assumed to work equally well for all patients without parallel attention to digital access and caregiver capacity.