dc.description.abstract | In recent years, remote healthcare has become more and more relevant. It provides
unique advantages and can increase accessibility to healthcare for many. Although
remote healthcare has unique advantages, it also has some unique drawbacks. One
of these is the negative experiences of patients and health-care providers (HCP)
using remote healthcare. A systematic literature review revealed that both patients
and HCP dislike remote healthcare, and feel it is often ’cold’ or impersonal, but
research that measures empathy between patients and HCP surprisingly does not
find a significant difference between empathy in remote healthcare and face-to-face
settings. In light of this, this research aims to answers the question: "How can
technology foster the necessary degree of empathy between patients and healthcare
providers, to improve the quality of telehealth applications?"
To answer this question, semi-structured interviews were conducted with general
practitioners (GPs) and their utterances were analysed using a design thinking approach,
using customer journeys and bottom-up pattern analysis of their utterances.
The goal was to output a set of design recommendations grounded in the literature,
which have been validated through a qualitative approach.
The interviews revealed that empathy was not actually lacking between patient and
HCP. HCP did often have strong negative opinions of remote healthcare. It was
hypothesized that these negative opinions led them to believe that the empathy
they can convey using remote healthcare was lacking, even when in reality patients
were satisfied. This would also explain the revelation from the literature review that
indicated that there was no significant difference in empathy between face-to-face
and remote settings. The created customer journeys, supported by the discovered
patterns, revealed three types of opportunities for changing the negative opinions of
GPs: Opportunities to persuade GPs to try more remote healthcare, opportunities for
GPs to share knowledge about remote healthcare, and opportunities to reduce the
stress GPs experience.
Implementing the created design recommendations based on the discovered opportunities
might change the negative opinions GPs have of remote healthcare. In turn,
the empathy they experience and expect during their use of remote healthcare might
improve. | |