title: Reducing uncertainties in virtual consultation: the impact of media naturalness and mental model alignment on patient satisfaction in doctor-patient communication
Creators: name: Shi, Yuxi
Publisher: name: Memorial University of Newfoundland
Year: 2020

description: Virtual consultation (VC) can be simply referred to as a
 telemedicine service that enables patients to access doctors remotely. It
 has been largely used by patients with many potential benefits.
 Nevertheless, many patients still have uncertainties regarding the
 consultation processes and results, which mostly concern
 communication with doctors. This thesis aims to answer the following
 two questions:
 1) What uncertainties do patients have during VC, and how do
 these uncertainties affect patients’ satisfaction towards the
 consultation?
 2) How does the medium affect patients’ perceived uncertainties
 and their satisfaction with VC?
 Two studies were conducted to examine the impact of media on
 perceived uncertainty and patients’ attitudes in doctor-patient computer-mediated
 communication (CMC), based on uncertainty reduction theory,
 media naturalness theory, and mental model theory.The first study is a content analysis to analyze why patients are
 willing to visit doctors virtually and what uncertainties patients have
 about VC. Patients’ online reviews on five famous virtual consultation
 systems were collected to do content analysis. The results show that the
 uncertainties patients have during patient-doctor communication in VC
 are mainly on doctors’ behaviour, describing symptoms, understanding
 doctors, doctors’ feelings and emotions, doctors’ attitudes, and VC
 process. This study helps to understand patients’ concerns about using
 healthcare systems to do VC and reconceptualizes uncertainty in the
 context of patient-doctor CMC.
 The second study is a field experiment to explore how media
 naturalness (selection of media) and mental model alignment (media
 content) influence the patients’ perceived uncertainties which then
 impact on the patients’ satisfaction with the VC experience. After three
 rounds of pre-tests, 327 valid questionnaires were obtained in the main
 test and used to do data analysis. The results support the following
 hypotheses: a) Higher levels of media naturalness reduce patients’ perceived uncertainty level. b) Higher levels of mental model alignment
 (i.e., the alignment of VC design with patients’ mental models) decrease
 patients’ perceived uncertainty level. c) Patients’ lower level of perceived
 uncertainty increases their level of satisfaction.
 This thesis contributes by revealing the meaning of uncertainties in
 VC and improving our understanding of how to reduce the patients’
 perceived uncertainties by better designing VC system. It provides
 empirical evidence on how media naturalness and mental model
 alignment increase patients’ satisfaction on VC by reducing their
 uncertainties. The results can serve as a basis for further research on how
 to enhance the design of VC systems to fit patients’ psychological and
 cognitive processes when they use these systems to visit doctors online.
 The thesis contributes practically by facilitating healthcare providers to
 understand patients’ concerns and uncertainties while partaking in VC,
 and by guiding the design of VC systems to enhance communication
 between patients and doctors, and thus increase patient satisfaction.