Modeling the Personas of Primary Care Communication Modality Usage: Experiences from the R-Health Direct Primary Care...

Recent advancements in mediated communication technologies enable unfettered communication between patients and their providers. We explore patients' utilization of different direct and mediated communication modalities in a Direct Primary Care (DPC) clinic and the patient characteristics that predict their communication behavior patterns. Based on this knowledge, we developed 2 patient personas that explicate the nuances of patients who tend to prefer visiting the clinic in person versus those who use mediated modalities more often. We hope this study may inform future work in understanding and supporting patient-provider communication in a new technical environment. The results suggest that patients and their health team alike may be incentivized to voluntarily adopt and utilize multi-modality communication in a DPC setting.