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

Mengling Yan, Hongying Tan, Luxue Jia and Umair Akram
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Mengling Yan: School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
Hongying Tan: School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
Luxue Jia: School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
Umair Akram: Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 7, 1-16

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.

Keywords: poor doctor-patient relationship; healthcare consultation; mobile context; computer-mediated communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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