Table 2.

Summary of the consequences of health care professional–patient online interactions on different health care stakeholders in general.

Stakeholders and consequences		Description	Number of studies
Patients
	Patient empowerment	More empowerment for patients	7
	Health promotion	Improvement of the patients’ health conditions; increase of patient adherence to treatments	4
	Uncertain answers	Unavailability of clear answers due to insufficient patient information held by health care professionals	2
Health care professionals
	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
	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
	More appointments	Potential opportunities to have more patient appointments	3
Managers
	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
	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
	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