The Impact of Health Information Digitization on the Physiotherapist-Patient Relationship: A Pilot Study of the Lebanese Community

摘要

The healthcare field presents a high interest for patients who surf the net for pathology definitions, symptoms, treatments and medications mostly before visiting a health practitioner. No matter the quantity of information found on the internet, the quality and credibility of this information is sometimes questionable. It is the first of its kind in the physiotherapy field in general and in Lebanon specifically, aiming to explore the impact of the medical information research on the internet and how it affects the PT-patient relationship, adopting a positivist and deductive approach, based on similar studies conducted in the context of other health care specialties. For this article, the authors sent a questionnaire-based survey that was computerized and analyzed using SPSS program. For HI, 32 of the variation in the PT-patient relationship was caused by seeking health information on the internet, and in H2: 27.2 of the variation in the acceptance of the physiotherapist's medical plan was caused by seeking health information on the internet. Over the years, the rapid evolution of the Internet and the emergence of various innovative forms of social media such as YouTube, online Portals and web-based Communities as well as social communication networks such as Facebook, Linkedln and Twitter have seen massive amount of information being quickly disseminated to individuals worldwide; importantly, access to such media information has also been largely free of charge (De Oliveira, 2014). Today, healthcare Internet-based content is proliferating on publicly available websites that are also conveniently accessible via WIFI-enabled laptop computers, powerful tablets and/or smart phones engineered with user-friendly interfaces (Agius Stangeland, 2016).