Abstract
Telecare has the potential to increase the quality of care while also decreasing costs. However, despite great potential, efficiency in care practices and cost reduction remain hypothetical. Within computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), one focus of telecare research has been on awareness support in distributed real-time communication in comparison to physical meetings since face-to-face consultations have been known as the “gold standard” of conducting care. Research has shown that it is hard to maintain qualities such as awareness through video-mediated meetings. In this research, the goal has not been to mimic the qualities of face-to-face consultations but rather to document the qualities of three types of patient meetings (consultations) and to understand in what kinds of situations each consultation type is a viable option. In this paper, we focus on the essential qualities of i) face-to-face consultations, ii) video-based consultations, and iii) telephone consultations and shed light on their affordances. The research contribution includes an extension of the affordance lens to incorporate socio-technical, two-sided affordances, that constitute important aspects for understanding complexity when heterogeneous actors co-existing in a practice, where affordances can differ for different “sides” in the complex practice—a view that is fruitful when dealing with heterogeneous actors and a set of analog and digital tools in a practice.
Highlights
Telecare has the potential to increase patient empowerment and the quality of care while decreasing costs and promoting improved access (Andersen et al 2018; Holman and Lorig 2004; Johnston et al 2013; Koch 2006; Street Jr et al 2005)
In this paper we focused on the essential qualities of i) face-to-face consultations, ii) video-based consultations, and iii) telephone consultations and shed light on their affordances
We extend the lens of affordances to include a socio-technical view on affordances and suggest two-sided and multi-sided affordances for practices that include heterogeneous actors and a variety of tools
Summary
Telecare has the potential to increase patient empowerment and the quality of care while decreasing costs and promoting improved access (Andersen et al 2018; Holman and Lorig 2004; Johnston et al 2013; Koch 2006; Street Jr et al 2005). Awareness is a fuzzy concept that is hard to design into to IT artifacts meant to mimic face-to-face meetings (Greenberg and Gutwin 2016). The research on awareness and the design of IT artifacts that are to function as well as face-to-face meetings often takes on either groupware as a way of conducting collaborations (cf Greenberg and Gutwin 2016; Gutwin and Greenberg 2002; Tenenberg et al 2016) or telecare as a context for mimicking in-hospital care. What has been shown is that it is hard to maintain qualities such as awareness through video-mediation meetings (cf Greenberg and Gutwin 2016; Tenenberg et al 2016). A practice lens is applied in order to design a new and complementary way of working out consultations
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