Patients
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Patient empowerment |
More empowerment for patients |
7 |
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Health promotion |
Improvement of the patients’ health conditions; increase of patient adherence to treatments |
4 |
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Uncertain answers |
Unavailability of clear answers due to insufficient patient information held by health care professionals |
2 |
Health care professionals
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Social and economic returns |
Acquisition of social returns, such as better reputation and greater popularity; acquisition of economic returns, such as online votes, bonus, likes, and electronic gifts from patients |
4 |
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Lack of control over their role |
Leading to a lack of private time and life in disorder; service requests beyond one’s professional capacity |
4 |
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More appointments |
Potential opportunities to have more patient appointments |
3 |
Managers
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Better understanding of the patients’ needs |
Useful insights for online health care service managers to understand the patients’ needs, especially in terms of service delivery and pricing strategies |
4 |
Patients, health care professionals
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Improvement of communication efficiency in offline settings |
Improved ability of patients describing a specific health problem; increased face-to-face communication skills of professionals on account of the experience of formulating online text-based answers |
3 |
All stakeholders
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Ethical dilemmas and legal issues |
Unauthorized dissemination of personal information of health care professionals by patients; professional’s uncertainty about the legitimacy whether or not to use online public information about patients and the rationality of online private communication with patients; ambiguity of information authorization for managers |
9 |