Abstract:

Digital communication can contribute to a higher efficiency of organizations. This study aimed to describe the physicians’ perceptions about the use of digital communication in Romania, with an emphasis on the strengths and challenges in implementing this kind of approach in daily care. Several advantages of digital communication were consistently reported: global scale, user-friendly profile, multi-shaped form, the role of facilitator in what concerns the therapeutic partnership and the progressive construction of more adequate protocols of care. Still, a number of challenges emerged as significant and potentially detrimental for the quality of care and wellbeing of patients: the low consistency of patient decisions across time, the short buying cycle of e-products, including digital communication, the novelty of the e-patient concept, the difficulty in controlling the quality of information delivered or received through digital communication, the risk of self-diagnosis and self-medication, and additional technical issues, related to the shift from classical communication to digital communication and back, GDPR, or the proper selection through DC of cases requiring special treatment. A lot of efforts should be still implemented for increasing the functionality of digital communication in health care systems and the long-term satisfaction of actors involved in the therapeutic process.