Title
The Virtual Clinic: Two-sided Affordances in Consultation Practice
Abstract
Telecare has the potential to increase the quality of care while also decreasing costs. However, despite great potential, efficiency in care practices and cost reduction remain hypothetical. Within computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), one focus of telecare research has been on awareness support in distributed real-time communication in comparison to physical meetings since face-to-face consultations have been known as the “gold standard” of conducting care. Research has shown that it is hard to maintain qualities such as awareness through video-mediated meetings. In this research, the goal has not been to mimic the qualities of face-to-face consultations but rather to document the qualities of three types of patient meetings (consultations) and to understand in what kinds of situations each consultation type is a viable option. In this paper, we focus on the essential qualities of i) face-to-face consultations, ii) video-based consultations, and iii) telephone consultations and shed light on their affordances. The research contribution includes an extension of the affordance lens to incorporate socio-technical, two-sided affordances, that constitute important aspects for understanding complexity when heterogeneous actors co-existing in a practice, where affordances can differ for different “sides” in the complex practice—a view that is fruitful when dealing with heterogeneous actors and a set of analog and digital tools in a practice.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s10606-019-09350-3
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
Keywords
Field
DocType
telecare, telehealth, virtual clinic, affordances, practice, qualities, two-sided affordances, multi-sided affordances, consultations
Informatics,Computer-supported cooperative work,Computer science,Telecare,Knowledge management,Quality of care,Delegation (computing),Telehealth,Affordance,Cost reduction
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
3
0925-9724
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anna Sigridur Islind104.06
Ulrika Lundh Snis245.71
Tomas Lindroth3154.78
Johan Lundin423.13
Katerina Cerná502.70
Gunnar Steineck602.37