The Role of Physicians in Digitalizing Health Care Provision: Web-Based Survey Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Digitalization affects all areas of society, including the health care sector. However, the digitalization of health care provision is progressing slowly compared to other sectors. In the professional and political literature, physicians are partially portrayed as digitalization sceptics. Thus, the role of physicians in this process requires further investigation. The theory of "digital natives" suggests a lower hurdle for younger generations to engage with digital technologies. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to investigate the role of physicians in the process of digitalizing health care provision in Germany and to assess the age factor. METHODS: We conducted a large-scale study to assess the role of this professional group in the progress of the digital transformation of the German health care sector. Therefore, in an anonymous online survey, we inquired about the current digital penetration of the personal working environment, expectations, attitude toward, and concerns regarding digitalization. Based on these data, we studied associations with the nominal variable age and variations across 2 age groups. RESULTS: The 1274 participants included in the study generally showed a high affinity towards digitalization with a mean of 3.88 on a 5-point Likert scale; 723 respondents (56.75%) stated they personally use mobile apps in their everyday working life, with a weak tendency to be associated with the respondents' age (η=0.26). Participants saw the most noticeable existing benefits through digitalization in data quality and readability (882/1274, 69.23%) and the least in patient engagement (213/1274, 16.72%). Medical practitioners preponderantly expect further improvements through increased digitalization across almost all queried areas but the most in access to medical knowledge (1136/1274, 89.17%), treatment of orphan diseases (1016/1274, 79.75%), and medical research (1023/1274, 80.30%). CONCLUSIONS: Respondents defined their role in the digitalization of health care provision as ambivalent: "scrutinizing" on the one hand but "active" and "open" on the other. A gap between willingness to participate and digital sovereignty was indicated. Thus, education on digitalization as a means to support health care provision should not only be included in the course of study but also in the continuing process of further and advanced training.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".