The Perils of Online Health Information in Physician–Patient Interactions

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Annika Herr; Professor Dr. Arndt Reichert; Professor Dr. Gianfranco Walsh
• Subject Area: Management and Marketing
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 529598823

Medical information and evaluation portals allow patients to find information that they can use to make health-related decisions. In the healthcare sector, these are viewed as a form of strengthening informational self-determination. By reducing information asymmetries, such portals have the potential to bring about positive changes and improvements in well-being. Patients increasingly search for online health information (OHI) prior to appointments with physicians (and many do so after their appointments) because they reasonably expect such information to facilitate meaningful interactions with their physician. Patients thus may feel empowered to have discussions with doctors on an equal footing and take a more active role in the provision and use of healthcare services. As a result, in treatment situations, physicians must increasingly appreciate and evaluate online health information that is brought to them. However, the easy availability of medical information online also raises a caution, in that OHI suffers from questionable veracity and objectivity. Whether peer-provided or obtained from professional health portals, OHI can be misleading or confusing, especially to patients with poor medical literacy. Regardless of the quality of such information and patients’ medical literacy, introducing OHI during appointments requires physicians to appraise the information, who may feel challenged. As a result, both anecdotal and growing empirical evidence suggests that patients who gather OHI prior to appointments with their physician suffer diminished cocreation and well-being outcomes. Although some studies identify physicians’ responses to patients’ OHI provision, such research fails to provide a comprehensive account of different physician responses and largely neglects patients’ subsequent behavior, following from the experience of sharing OHI with the physician and encountering the physician’s response. Against this background, the proposed research focusses on the OHI-infused interaction between physician and patient. Across three subprojects, this project aims to develop psychrometric scales to capture 1) physicians’ OHI-related appraisal as well as 2) patients’ perceptions of the appropriateness physician’s response to shared OHI, and 3) their dyadic interactions. The new constructs will be embedded in a rich nomological network of interrelations with important outcomes. The results of the proposed research should help to better understand unintended consequences of OHI in the context of health services and to provide starting points for mutually satisfactory and effective medical consultations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants