Interview with famous Estonian psychologist
We are investigating the potential interests and risks for healthcare providers. This week we contacted specialist in psychology Sergei Prisajny, who is the owner of a small clinic “Renatus” (www.renatus.eu) and is really old schooled practitioner. During the interview, some unexpected risks and misunderstandings were discovered from the old school doctors point of view. According to these issues we decided to make a short article that defines the risks and misunderstandings and clarifies the most common uncertainties for the old school healthcare specialists. During the interview our goal was to get useful information about possible emotional security issues so that we can deal with them in the early stages of software design.
First, we should mention that even for specialists in psychology the risks for individuals related to the personal medical data sharing are not clear. According to the old school approach, there is only one leading factor that makes people to use the software and it is marketing. However, in recent years, the rapid development of socio-technical systems and cross-organizational processes has changed the relations between people and internet. Social networks showed that people pay attention not only on web page colors but also on the community involved. Nowadays there are lots of different service available via internet and their attractiveneыы consists not only from User Interface but also on the transparency. You may have a great user interface but people will not use it anyway as they can be afraid of their personal data secondary usage. Original case is described here — http://medicine.unimelb.edu.au/research-groups/general-practice-research/mental-health-program/the-target-d-trial.
When it comes to understanding that personal medical data can be used by other stakeholders old school specialists agree that person will not accept such a system if there is no security guaranteed. At the same time their knowledge of modern system and internet does not allow to provide reasonable solution for the transparency. In our case, the revolutionary technologies such as blockchains and smart contracts should be explained in more detailed and simply way in order to cover most of our potential users.
Economy is another challenge for the project that was revealed. When it comes to profitability, private doctors accept it but in a classical way. There is a mistrust in crypto currency as it is a new finance mechanism. Also the value of tokens needs to be explained more simply and in details as old school specialists are very conservative and do not accept changes of their working processes defined decades of years ago. For us it is clear that they are still our potential customers and we will focus on the increasing their knowledge level removing scepticism. To reach this goal we plan to create Q&A both for old school conservators and for individuals so that most of the typical questions were gathered in one place together with answers.
To summarize the interview results we can say that example of Sergei was very useful for us. It helped to reveal possible future problems in our system launch. Main problems are related to specialist’s low internet and modern technology knowledge level, conservatism in healthcare service providing, mistrust in revolutionary products. At the same time, such a specialist is interested in extra profit and understands the main risks related to the data security. To engage such an old school professional to the new socio-technical relations we need to be patient and consistent to help them get rid off their fears and mistrusts so that we could together enter the new world in e-health.
