(How) do People Negotiate Online Information into their Decision Making with Healthcare Professionals?

Abstract

In this paper, we describe how people negotiate and communicate with healthcare professionals (HCPs) about information they have found online for the purposes of making health decisions. Drawing on 55 interviews with people using the Internet as part of their health decision-making we show how online information can be successfully integrated into decision-making leading to decision satisfaction and perceived positive outcomes. We describe what successful integration looks like as well as detail the ways in which integration of information can be disguised during negotiations with HCPs. Finally, we document what happens when integration fails, potentially valuable information resources are lost or the patient decides to bypass the HCP altogether. By exploring successful and unsuccessful integration examples we make three suggestions about how integration of online health information into HCP discussions around decision-making could be improved via (1) improved digital curation tools (2) providing communication scaffolding for the doctor-patient consultation and (3) harnessing the power of collective resources.