Abstract
BackgroundThe internet has now become part of human life and is constantly changing people's way of life. With the increasing popularity of online health information (OHI), it has been found that OHI can affect the physician-patient relationship by influencing patient behaviors.ObjectiveThis study aims to systematically investigate the impact of OHI-seeking behavior on the physician-patient relationship.MethodsLiterature retrieval was conducted on 4 databases (Web of Science, PubMed, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, SinoMed), and the time limit for literature publication was before August 1, 2021.ResultsWe selected 53 target papers (42 [79%] English papers and 11 [21%] Chinese papers) that met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 31 (58%) papers believe that patients’ OHI behavior can enable them to participate in their own medical care, improve patient compliance, and improve the physician-patient relationship. In addition, 14 (26%) papers maintain a neutral attitude, some believing that OHI behavior has no significant effect on doctors and patients and others believing that due to changes in the factors affecting OHI behavior, they will have a negative or a positive impact. Furthermore, 8 (15%) papers believe that OHI search behavior has a negative impact on doctors and patients, while 6 (11%) papers show that OHI reduces Chinese patients’ trust in doctors.ConclusionsOur main findings showed that (1) OHI-seeking behavior has an impact on patients' psychology, behavior, and evaluation of doctors; (2) whether patients choose to discuss OHI with doctors has different effects on the physician-patient relationship; and (3) the negative impact of OHI on China’s internet users is worthy of attention. Due to the low quality of OHI, poor health information literacy, short physician-patient communication time, and various types of negative news, patients' trust in doctors has declined, thus affecting the physician-patient relationship. Improvement of people's health information literacy and the quality of OHI are important factors that promote the positive impact of OHI on the physician-patient relationship.
Highlights
IntroductionAbout 4.66 billion people worldwide have access to the internet [1]. The internet has gradually become part of human life, constantly changing people's lifestyle
Considering that online health information (OHI) may have a positive or a negative impact on the physician-patient relationship, which is important in medical care, this study aims to examine the impact of OHI on the physician-patient relationship in China
From the perspective of literature research methods, most of the studies were carried out in the form of questionnaires and interviews, and there were 11 (26%) studies in which research models and hypotheses were first proposed and questionnaires were designed for verification to study the mechanism of OHI seeking affecting the physician-patient relationship from different perspectives [11,23-32]
Summary
About 4.66 billion people worldwide have access to the internet [1]. The internet has gradually become part of human life, constantly changing people's lifestyle. With the increasing popularity of online health information (OHI), it has been found that OHI can affect the physician-patient relationship by influencing patient behaviors. 14 (26%) papers maintain a neutral attitude, some believing that OHI behavior has no significant effect on doctors and patients and others believing that due to changes in the factors affecting OHI behavior, they will have a negative or a positive impact. Due to the low quality of OHI, poor health information literacy, short physician-patient communication time, and various types of negative news, patients' trust in doctors has declined, affecting the physician-patient relationship. Improvement of people's health information literacy and the quality of OHI are important factors that promote the positive impact of OHI on the physician-patient relationship
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