The Doctors, Their Patients, and the Symptom Checker App: Qualitative Interview Study With General Practitioners in...

Area of Science:

• Digital Health
• Health Services Research
• General Practice

Background:

• Symptom checker apps (SCAs) offer preliminary diagnoses and guidance to laypeople.
• Their integration into healthcare systems raises questions about their impact on clinical practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore general practitioners' (GPs) experiences with SCAs.
• To understand how SCAs interact with the macro, meso, and micro levels of daily GP work.
• To assess the influence of SCAs on work-related psychosocial resources and demands for GPs.

Main Methods:

• Conducted 8 semistructured interviews with GPs in Germany.
• Utilized an integrative basic method for interpretative-reconstructive data analysis.
• Identified core themes and modes of thematization regarding SCA use.

Main Results:

• Most GPs were open to healthcare digitization but unfamiliar with specific SCAs.
• GPs viewed SCAs as part of patients' self-directed health information seeking.
• Relevance of SCAs was linked to influencing patient decisions to seek medical consultation.

Conclusions:

• GPs adopted a techno-pragmatic perspective on SCAs.
• SCAs were perceived as potential resources for reducing administrative burdens and unnecessary contacts.
• SCAs could become demands if they increased workload, patient anxiety, or patient insistence.