Telemedicine: Technology mediated service relationship, encounter, or something else?

PURPOSE Service interactions between service providers and health care consumers happen daily in health care organizations, and can occur face-to-face or through mediating technology. We use the demanding and rich environment of telemedicine to better understand the nature of the real time service-encounter interactions among the human and technology actors engaged in the process and to inform telemedicine providers about key factors to consider in telemedicine design. METHODS We conducted a case study of medical video conferencing (MVC) for the delivery of patient healthcare (a form of telemedicine) using multiple data collection and analysis techniques involving a range of telemedicine stakeholders. RESULTS The research reveals that telemedicine requires a new kind of service relationship, an Advanced Encounter, with unique relationships between the telemedicine service providers, presenters, patients, and technology. Seven facilitating factors for the Advanced Encounter of telemedicine are identified and discussed, including the telemedicine servicescape: a set of supporting structures that are critical to telemedicine success. CONCLUSIONS Key contributions are a deep understanding of the relationships between telemedicine actors, and the organizational actions needed to deploy a technology-mediated telemedicine service.