Patient rating of doctors using computers

In order to shed some light on the impact of a computer on medical consultations, 140 new hospital out-patients rated the doctor they had just seen, and their ideal doctor using a 38-item semantic differential-type scale. Sixty-four of the patients had experienced a computer being used by one of the three doctors participating in the study. Each patient's ratings of a doctor were compared with their ratings of the ideal doctor by paired t-tests. The doctors, when using the computer, tended to be seen as less matching up to these ideals than when they did not use the computer. All three received more non-ideal ratings when using the computer. However, this was less so for two of the doctors than for the third, who with a computer was seen as less than ideally listening and paying attention, and was also rated as less than ideally warm, friendly, liking and comforting. Perhaps surprisingly, this doctor had tried to minimize the effect of the computer during the consultation, while the doctor who used the computer 'conversationally' during the interview was rated overall as better with it than without it. It would appear that the pattern of computer use in the consultation and even its apparent intrusiveness need not have an adverse effect on patient ratings of doctors, but that computer use can cause problems for this aspect of the doctor-patient relationship.