The Antecedents of Poor Doctor-Patient Relationship in Mobile Consultation: A Perspective from Computer-Mediated Communication

Abstract

This study aims to understand the underlying reasons for poor doctor-patient relationships (DPR). While extant studies on antecedents of poor DPR mainly focus on the offline context and often adopt the patients' perspective, this work focuses on the mobile context and take both doctors' and mobile consultation users' perspectives into consideration. To fulfill this purpose, we first construct a theoretical framework based on the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) literature. Then we coded 592 doctor-user communication records to validate and elaborate the proposed theoretical model. This work reveals that characteristics of mobile technologies pose potential challenges on both doctors' and patients' information providing, informative interpreting, and relationship maintaining behaviors, resulting in 10 and 6 types of inappropriate behaviors of doctors and users, respectively, that trigger poor DPR in the mobile context. The findings enrich the research on online DPR and provide insights for improving DPR in the mobile context. Extant research on mobile healthcare service is emerging, but studies that aim at uncovering the underlying reasons for poor DPRs in the mobile context are still lacking. The majority of previous research tends to focus on the positive experience brought about by mobile healthcare services, such as user satisfaction [10] and the adoption or continuous usage of mobile technology [3,11]. However, the experience of dissatisfied participants is largely ignored. The negative experience is also worth noting because understanding the complaints guide practitioners to improve service quality [8]. Although a few studies have paid attention to the dissatisfying experience of mobile healthcare services, they tend to interpret the experience only from the perspective of users [8,12]. While these studies are insightful, a single perspective from users is not adequate, because they missed the perception of doctors which is considered quite different from that of users [13,14].These two literature gaps (namely lacking studies on dissatisfying experience of mobile healthcare services and lacking dual perspectives from both users and doctors) might partly be attributed to the mainstream research method in the healthcare field. Most studies rely on questionnaires and interviews to collect subjective ratings about mobile healthcare services, such as Akter et al. (2013) [15], Deng et al. (2015) [16], and Wu et al. (2018) [17]. The collected responses are usually inaccurate since respondents are rating events that happened at an earlier time. Besides, it is difficult to match responses from doctors and patients via questionnaires.This work aims to uncover the underlying reasons for poor DPR from dual perspectives of both doctors and users in mobile medical consultation service. To achieve our goals, we first reviewed the literature on Computer-Mediated Communication (hereafter, CMC) in search of theoretical accounts for the poor DPR in the mobile context. The CMC literature focuses on the influence of the fe...

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