Soft skills as mediation competencies in digitally mediated healthcare

Digital transformation is reshaping healthcare delivery, with growing but uneven incorporation of artificial intelligence into clinical practice. While often framed in terms of efficiency, access, and performance optimization, less attention has been paid to its relational consequences for everyday professional work. Limited empirical insight exists into how healthcare professionals experience digitally mediated care and how soft skills are enacted, constrained, and sustained. This qualitative study examines how healthcare professionals conceptualize and experience soft skills in digitally mediated environments. Based on semi-structured interviews with 46 physicians, nurses, and emergency care professionals across hospitals, health maintenance organizations, and emergency medical services, the study analyzes how soft skills are enacted, what constrain their use, and how professionals learn and adapt over time. Data were collected in 2023-2024, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. The findings identify four themes: (1) Digitally Driven Changes in Healthcare Practice; (2) Enacting Soft Skills in Digitally Mediated Healthcare; (3) The Compression Paradox: When Digital Efficiency Intensifies Relational Strain; and (4) Learning to Sustain Soft Skills - Adaptation, Reinforcement, and Professional Re-Skilling in Digitally Mediated Healthcare. Overall, the study shows that in digitally mediated healthcare, soft skills remain essential for maintaining trust, clarity, and relational care, while also being reconfigured by changing interactional conditions. The findings introduce interactional intensity and a compression paradox to explain how digital transformation reshapes relational work, making it more time-pressured, effortful, and context-dependent. By conceptualizing soft skills as mediation competencies, the study shows how abilities often treated as stable individual attributes are enacted and transformed in digitally mediated care. Their effective use depends on supportive organizational conditions and may erode without them. Rather than framing soft skills solely as trainable competencies, the study highlights their situated role under shifting organizational, interactional, and temporal demands in digitally mediated care.