It’s All about the Medium: Identifying Patients’ Medial Preferences for Telemedical Consultations

Coping with the consequences of the demographic change, industrialized countries have to adapt their health care systems to the increasing medical need of older persons despite the threatening shortage of physicians. In this context, telemedical services for communication between doctors and patients come into fore. However, it is unclear in how far users accept these new care concepts. Crucial for the success of telemedical services is the choice of the medium and its perceived appropriateness in different using situations. In this paper, an exploratory approach was undertaken to examine the users’ acceptance of four electronic communication media (telephone, videophone, videoconference, interactive wall) in three different usage situations (additional service, urgency situation, exclusively telemedical consultation). 200 participants volunteered to take part. Findings show that the acceptance strongly depends on the specific situation and the type of communication media. User diversity, in contrast, did not show a major role for the acceptance of telemedical consultation.