Interactive Affordance of Integrative Internet Social Media Platform Use by Patients and Physicians: A Mixed-Method Approach (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Integrative internet social media platform (IISMP) integrates the features of mobile and social media technologies as well as the legacy healthcare systems to support healthcare processes for patients and physicians that enables patient-centered care. To better understand the use of IISMP, especially the digital interactions between patients and physicians, we develop the concept of interactive affordance and use a mixed-method approach to identify and present the interactive affordance patterns based on patient event logs, physician-patient online consultation conversation texts, interviews, and focused group from a large hospital. OBJECTIVE This study proposes a new type of affordance, referred to as interactive affordance, which represents the interactions between physician and patient when they both use IISMP for providing care to the patient. We identify interactive affordance patterns and investigate their impacts on organizational changes in the healthcare context. METHODS We use a mixed-method approach to analyze various data collected from both primary and secondary sources. The data includes 45,147 archival healthcare event logs, 13,332 conversation texts, 15 interviews, and eight focus groups data from a large hospital that has implemented an IISMP. We use grounded theory analysis, process mining, text mining, and social network analysis to identify interactive affordance patterns and their impacts on healthcare processes and outcomes. RESULTS Based on the results from text mining, processing mining, social network, and ground coding analysis, we identify virtual healthcare consultation between patient and physician using IISMP as interactive affordance. The analysis results from the mixed-method approach confirm that interactive affordance, virtual consultation affordance, of IISMP use contributes to the changes in the communication and decision-making processes between patients and physicians. The virtual consultation affordance promotes patient-centered care by increasing patient's access to care, empowerment, and engagement. CONCLUSIONS The concept of interactive affordance is proposed as a new type of affordance to represent the interactions between patients and physicians emergent by using IISMP in healthcare organizations. This new affordance type explains organizational changes toward patient-centered care.