Electronic Patient Briefing and Informed Consent: Creating Patient Trust and Information Satisfaction through Social Presence and Personalization

摘要

Patient consultation and briefing are essential for patients to make informed, self-determined decisions in their medical treatment. However, cost and time pressures lead to medical specialists spending less time with patient consultation, which may result in decreasing consultation quality. Electronic consultations are a potential solution to this problem. We propose patients' trust and information satisfaction as key indicators of high consultation quality. We argue that the degree of social presence and personalization of information systems for informed consent and consultation positively influence these measures. Electronic consultation systems may therefore need to be designed to promote social presence and personalization. We develop five hypotheses on this relationship based on social presence theory. These hypotheses will be tested in a university hospital's radiology department in the scope of an interdisciplinary research project on cancer therapy.