*5.2. Practical Implications*

Our findings also provide practical implications for doctors, users and mobile consultation application developers. Doctors are suggested to provide more support for users to take part in their medical decisions. In specific, besides diagnostic results, more and more users regard the diagnostic process, evidence, advice, and etiology as additional information to make a medical decision. When doctors overlook or refuse to follow up on these information needs, users often, but not always, feel dissatisfied. In the meanwhile, doctors are suggested to understand and respond to users' emotional needs in mobile consultation service. For example, doctors should try their best to guarantee timely responses, make explanations or ask for understanding when responses have been delayed.

Users are suggested to acknowledge the limitation of mobile consultation service, and adjust their behaviors and expectation to cope with the potential challenges brought by mobile-mediated doctor-user communication. To be more specific, users should o ffer adequate, accurate, and relevant medical information on their initiatives to help doctors to understand their physical conditions and emotional needs. Moreover, expressing understanding and respect is helpful for users to build friendly relationships with their doctors.

Mobile consultation applications developers are supposed to optimize product designs by developing more e ffective tools to facilitate e ffective communication between doctors and users. For example, provide a template to instruct users to provide the required information for the diagnosis such as symptoms, examination reports, and medication use. The list of the required information help doctors collect users' information conveniently and avoid repeated inquiries. Response templates are also helpful for doctors to provide detailed and standard medical information. Other useful implications for developers may include monitoring users' waiting time during consultations to avoid users' negative feelings and giving appropriate reminders to physicians when necessary.

This study has several limitations, but it also points out several future directions. First, it is hard to capture doctors' feelings and opinions in communication records. Although we adopt measures to screen records that can reflect doctors' negative emotions, more e ffective methods of reflecting doctors' feelings and evaluations are needed. Future studies are encouraged to use questionnaires or interviews to collect data from doctors, to supplement existing qualitative second-hand data and further discover potential problems from the doctors' perspective. Second, to simplify the data analysis process, this study restricts doctor-user communication in one consultation. DPR stems from a long-term experience of care and counseling. Future research can consider the evolving characteristics of DPR and uncover the evolutionary process of poor DPR in the mobile context.
