3.4.5. Patient-Professional Relationship

Several studies addressed the issue of the healthcare professional's difficulty fostering rapport with their patients [44,56]. Bekes et al. and Tenforde et al. reported that healthcare professionals felt they had difficulties connecting emotionally to the patient [44,56]. Mental health professionals expressed that it was difficult to deal with emotional situations in digital care visits [45,49,52,56] mainly due to the inability to properly see patients' body language and facial expressions and the inability to use certain conflict management techniques from a distance [45,49,52,56].

Another concern regarding the patient-professional relationship was that digital care visits are less personal than face-to-face visits. This concern was reported in two studies that explained it happened due to a lack of physical presence and being there for the patient [52,60]. Similarly, therapists from the Wade et al. study felt that therapy sessions via digital care visits were less intimate [57]. Mental health workers experienced difficulty maintaining patients' attention and engagement due to their condition or distractions at home [45,46,56,57].
