Digital Presence and Emotional Strain: Clinicians’ Lived Experiences with Telemedicine
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Abstract
The rapid integration of telemedicine into clinical practice has significantly transformed healthcare delivery and professional experiences in digital health systems. While technical implementation has been widely studied, less is known about how healthcare professionals emotionally and ethically adapt to this digital shift. Previous research has largely overlooked the lived experiences and meaning-making processes of clinicians operating under pandemic-driven telemedicine systems. This study employs an interpretative phenomenological approach to explore how healthcare providers experienced emotional displacement, cognitive overload, and professional identity reconstruction while delivering care through telemedicine platforms. IPA is employed to capture clinicians’ interpretative meaning-making, emphasizing how individuals make sense of their personal and professional worlds in the context of digital healthcare.. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews with ten clinicians and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the study identified four key themes: emotional detachment, technological frustration, ethical dissonance, and redefinition of clinical presence. These findings demonstrate that adaptation to telemedicine involves complex internal negotiations that go beyond functional use and efficiency. The results emphasize the need for digital health systems that integrate emotional and ethical dimensions into their design and support frameworks. These insights contribute to a more holistic understanding of digital care and offer a foundation for future research on human-centered approaches in digital health transformation.
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