Patients´ choice of primary care - physical or digital consultation

The digital transformation is fast.

The Corona pandemic has led to an increased need and use for distance meetings between health care providers and patients.Digital primary health care needs to be evaluated scientifically and compared to ordinary physical primary health care in order to understand how this major change affects the system as well as the individual.We aim to a) identify drivers for choice of digital or physical primary care, as well as b) identify the different contexts, digital or physical primary care, impact on additional care sought within 7 days (by linkage to the healthcare database VAL, Vårdanalys-databasen)to describe how patient characteristics may impact adoption of digital primary healthcare services and if certain groups are left outto understand patient experience of physical and digital primary care and describe potential differences between the two contextsto describe patients awareness and use of the patient accessible electronic health record, describe any differences in characteristics of users and non-users, as well as their rational for adoption or non-adoptionTen primary healthcare providers, i.e. six primary care centers and four digital primary health care givers are involved.

We will recruit 4000 patients to answer a 60-item-questionnaire.

The ethics application is accepted.We need better knowledge to understand how to create good and equal future primary health care – digital, physical as well as digiphysical.