Doctor at your fingertips: An exploration of digital visits from stakeholders’ perspectives

Technological advances and the evolution of mobile technologies enable patients to meet their doctors through their smartphones. While offering the opportunity of virtual visits to patients, there are also challenges of this development. The purpose of this study was to increase the understanding of virtual visits, as perceived by experts working in telemedicine companies. . To serve to this purpose, authors conducted semi-structured interviews with managers and employees in eight telemedicine companies. The analysis of the empirical data confirmed the importance of virtual visits and their efficiency. The potential of virtual visits is expected to increase significantly, should they make use of remote devices to transfer real-time data from patients to physicians. In such a case, virtual visits are expected to cover approximately 70-75% of medical cases. However, the use of remote devices must be taken with caution and specific conditions need to be taken into account. We encourage researchers to perform research on promising technologies such as artificial intelligence and remote diagnostic devices, which could make more diagnoses and conditions being possible to treat by virtual visits. This is even more important in the light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.