No matter how much they use their own smartphones, patients often don’t respond well to their physicians being on their phones during a medical visit, although patients tolerate what they perceive to be emergency phone usage more than what seems to be personal, according to a new study by Israeli researchers published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Community Health.
Amit Gur, Eilat Chen Levy and Yaron Ariel—all of both the health-systems management and communication departments at College of Jezreel Valley in Israel—studied 356 people, culled from 700 Israeli adults surveyed in January 2022 who said that they had visited a doctor in the past year and had used a smartphone during the visit.
More than half of those surveyed (54.5%) were women, and those studied were 42.7-years-old, on average. Some 20% had college degrees and 9% held a master’s degree or higher. Some two-thirds (62.6%) were married and most (87.9%) were Jewish, 8% Muslim and 4.1% other, including Christians and Druze.
Those surveyed were part of four different health-insurance systems, and 58% had visited a primary care doctor and 42% a specialist.
Some 40.3% had visited the doctor for more than two years, while 23.1% were surveyed about a first-time visit to a physician. Respondents were asked whether their doctors used their smartphones (active use) or glanced at their phones (passive use) during the medical visit, whether they thought that phone usage disrupted the visit and whether they thought their doctors were using their phones in an emergency or for routine personal reasons.
“Most (72.7%) participants reported seeing the doctor using their smartphone during the visit, while 27.3% did not,” the researchers wrote. “A quarter (24.2%) reported that the doctor answering calls on their smartphone significantly interfered with their visit, while 14.2% reported no interference.”
Some 64.45% of participants saw their doctors glance (passive use) at their phones.
“Perceptions of service quality and patient satisfaction may be negatively impacted by physicians using smartphones during patient encounters,” the scholars wrote.
“Interestingly, the findings indicate that patients’ smartphone usage level did not correlate with perceived interruption, which might suggest that in healthcare services, patients tend to be less tolerant of doctors’ smartphone usage, irrespective of their own usage patterns,” they added.
