Understanding Decline in Medical Video Consultation - A User-Centred Approach.

Abstract

The world’s population is growing and ageing. Consequently, the demand for health care services increases, which leads to the need for health care providers to find new ways to provide services. Video consultations (VCs) are a cost-efficient way to address this problem. However, they can only work if both health professionals and patients trust and make use of VC systems. We describe our work on determining the reasons behind why the use of VC declined after an initial period of intensive use at a local Dutch medical centre. Questioning patients why they no longer contact their doctors via video was not possible as it would violate privacy law. We propose an alternative method that combines interviews with medical professionals and vignette studies, which can be used to follow up with patients potentially using VCs. We provide a set of lessons learned, which can support future inquiries in the medical domain.