Online virtual consultation between patients and physicians as interactive affordance

While healthcare providers have widely adopted digital health platforms for patient online virtual consultations, organizations are challenged by difficulties in utilizing them for effective physician–patient interactions. This study investigates online virtual consultations between physicians and patients enabled by their joint use of mobile social media technology. Based on affordance theory, we propose a new type of group-level affordance, interactive affordance, characterized by interactions between users with different predefined roles and varying preferences. We conceptualize interactive affordance as a second-order construct and propose the structure of interactive affordance that is affected by dyadic alignment and individual user affordances, influenced by three determinants (relative advantage, process standardization, and absorptive capacity). The interactive affordance affects two outcomes (physician and patient satisfaction). These relationships were tested using survey data collected from physicians and patients. The results show that interactive affordance actualization is affected by the dyadic alignments of their determinants, and it improves physician satisfaction. This study contributes to the affordance literature by proposing a new type of affordance, interactive affordance. It contributes to the literature on digital health technology used by users with differing preferences by showing the effects of dyadic alignment on the shared use of collaboration technology.