Healing at a distance: phenomenological perspective on patient experience of teleconsultation

The global crisis of Covid-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the use of telemedicine (the use of ICTs in health care). When on-site face-to-face consultation posed a threat to everyone’s safety, many countries, including Latvia, followed the recommendations issued by WHO, which advocated for the use of telemedicine to reduce risks of patients’ spreading the virus by traveling to hospitals. Taking into account the sudden increase in the use of telemedicine, especially in the form of teleconsultation, it becomes of crucial importance to understand what kind of impact the use of teleconsultation has on clinical encounter and, by extension, on the wellbeing of the patient? In this talk I will introduce my ongoing research project, which approaches this issue from the field of the phenomenology of medicine, which is a heterogeneous field of research using concepts and distinctions from the classical phenomenological tradition as well as phenomenologically informed qualitative research methodology. I will use conceptual material from the phenomenological tradition (concepts of embodiment, lived-body/object-body, life-world, intentionality, body-schema, alienation etc.), as well as conceptual framework for the understanding of the nature of clinical encounter provided by Edmund Pellegrino and S. Kay Toombs. I am planning to conduct qualitative research using research methodology called “Phenomenological Interview.” Based on the analysis of 12 semi-structured interviews, the study will result in the disclosure of invariant structures of patient experience of teleconsultation. In this stage of the research I will present the advantages of the phenomenological approach and the provisional results regarding the impact of teleconsultation on patient experience. The disclosure of invariant structures of patient experience of teleconsultation will help both to rethink the significance of the on-site face-to-face clinical encounter and to avoid teleconsultation’s potential pitfalls and harvest its potential benefits for the improvement of patient wellbeing and care.