Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 10, 2020
Date Accepted: Nov 17, 2021
Online Health Information Seeking Affects Physician-patient Relationships: A Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
The Internet has now become a part of human life and constantly changes people's way of life. With the increasing popularity of online health information, it has been found that online health information can affect the doctor-patient relationship by influencing patient behaviors.
Objective:
To systematically study the impact of online health information seeking behavior on the physician-patient relationship.
Methods:
Literature retrieval was conducted on the four databases (Web of Science, PubMed, CNKI, SinoMed), and the time limit for literature publication was before August 1st, 2021.
Results:
We selected 53 target articles (42 English articles and 11 Chinese articles) that met the inclusion criteria. 31 articles believe that patients OHI behavior can enable patients to participate in their own medical care, improve patient compliance, and improve doctors and patients. 14 articles remained neutral attitude, some believe that OHI behavior has no significant effect on doctors and patients, and some believe that due to changes in the factors affecting OHI behavior, they will have a negative or positive impact. 8 articles believe that online health information search behavior has a negative impact on doctors and patients, 6 articles showed that Online health information reduces Chinese patients’ trust in doctors.
Conclusions:
Our main findings showed that (1) online health information-seeking behavior has an impact on patients' psychology, behavior, and evaluation of doctors. (2) Whether patients choose to discuss online health information with doctors or not has different effects on the physician-patient relationship. (3) the negative impact of online health information on China Internet users is worthy of attention. Due to the low quality of online health information, poor health information literacy, short physician-patient communication time, and various negative news, patients' trust in doctors has declined, thus affecting physician-patient relationship. Improving people's health information literacy and the quality of online health information are important factors that promotes the positive impact of online health information on the physician-patient relationships.
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