Date of Award

4-2019

Document Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Ted Bitner

Second Advisor

Colleen McCracken

Third Advisor

Catherine Sherwood-Laughlin

Fourth Advisor

Matthew Beekley

Abstract

With the evolution of technology well underway, many of the consequences of its changes to our social interactions between doctor and patient have gone unnoted. With a computer in the room, healthcare professionals may be less likely to listen, touch, or communicate in the same way that they have in the past. This change appears to alter the relationship building process between a doctor and their patient. If trust and faith in the professional are tampered with, this could directly correlate to patient follow-through and outcome. In order to better understand the psychological response to the means of communication, touch, time and malpractice are analyzed. Since there is little information on some of these topics, related articles are used to make correlations and hypothesize on the outcome of different relative practices. An empirical study of the impact of these factors was done via Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=60). Results show that there does seem to be an effect of the computer on the doctor-patient relationship and the resulting care of the patient.

Comments

Honor Scholar Thesis

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