Table 1.

Characteristics of included studies.

Authors	Country	Study type	Intervention	Setting	Participants and databases	Analysis method
Atherton et al, 2018 [24]	England and Scotland	Mixed methods case design	Alternatives to face-to-face consultations	General practices with varied experience of implementing alternatives to face-to-face consultations	Patients and practice staff	Descriptive statistics, multivariate analysis, and coding of qualitative data from EMIS Health
Banks et al, 2018 [4]	West of England	Qualitative	eConsult	General practices that piloted an e-consultation system for 15 months during 2015 and 2016	23 semistructured interviews with staff members	Thematic analysis of interview data
Cowie et al, 2018 [25]	Scotland	Mixed methods	eConsult	11 general practices piloting eConsult	44 semistructured practice staff interviews, 1 focus group (4 staff), and 291 patient survey responses	Health economics, thematic analysis and coding, patient survey, descriptive statistics
Carter et al, 2018 [6]	South West England	Mixed methods	WebGP	6 GP practices in Devon	Six practices provided consultations data; 20 GPs completed case reports (regarding 61 e-consults); 81 patients completed questionnaires; 5 GPs and 5 administrators were interviewed	Statistical analysis of surveys, thematic analysis of interview data
Farr et al, 2018 [3]	South West England	Mixed methods	eConsult	6 general practices	23 practice staff interviews, patient survey data for 756 e-consultations from 36 practices	Economic analysis on usage and costs, Normalization Process Theory, inductive thematic analysis, patient survey and record data statistical analysis
Ogden, 2018 [26]	N/Aa	Opinion piece	Online consulting	N/A	N/A	Descriptive statistics
Marshall et al, 2018 [8]	N/A	Opinion piece	Online consulting	N/A	N/A	N/A
Casey et al, 2017 [1]	N/A	Mixed methods case study	Online consultation system	Inner-city general practice	Information technology developers, clinicians, and administrative staff	Thematic and discourse analysis of interview data
Edwards et al, 2017 [16]	South West of England	Observational study	eConsult	South West of England	eConsult data obtained from 36 general practices	Economic analysis, website analytics, survey-based statistical analysis
Wise, 2017 [10]	N/A	Opinion piece	Online consultations	N/A	N/A	N/A
Hanna et al, 2012 [27]	Scotland	Qualitative	Non–face-to-face consultations	Scotland	20 semistructured interviews with general practitioners	Thematic analysis of interviews
Mair et al, 2012 [28]	N/A	Systematic review	eHealth systems (only information pertaining to online consultations recorded)	N/A	MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and the Cochrane Library were searched for reviews published between January 1, 1995, and March 17, 2009. Studies had to be systematic reviews, narrative reviews, qualitative meta-syntheses or meta-ethnographies of eHealth implementation	Evidence synthesis
Hanna et al, 2011 [15]	Scotland	Mixed methods	Non–face-to-face consultations	Scotland	600 practice manager questionnaire responses, 20 practice manager interviews	Chi-squared test from a survey, thematic analysis of interviews

^aN/A: not applicable.