Telemedicine in the Italian public sphere: Health professionals resist change and transformation

Background: By employing novel information and communication technologies, telemedicine promises to transform traditional healthcare practices into more inclusive and equitable ones, such as overcoming spatial and time barriers. Moreover, it enables unprecedented participatory opportunities fostering collaboration and value co-creation between health professionals and patients. However, despite catching much public attention, telemedicine is still unevenly diffused in the Italian context. Thus, through social representations theory, we aimed to investigate how telemedicine was represented by the Italian press, laypeople, and health professionals. Methods: By integrating press and survey data sources, we performed the following analyses: (a) a salience analysis of the press, gauging the topic’s public relevance over time (1990-2022); (b) a qualitative content analysis of the articles published by Corriere della Sera (n=1704; 2019-2022); (c) descriptive analyses of survey data (n=2375), collected among a population of Italian news readers. Findings: Salience analysis showed that telemedicine’s popularity grew slowly until 2020, when it rocketed to 10447 published news. Content analysis showed that the press mainly represented telemedicine as a care facilitator (e.g., enabling care access, facilitating monitoring, fostering prevention). Likewise, survey results showed that laypeople conceptualised telemedicine in instrumental terms, cutting out time and space barriers. Conversely, healthcare professionals referred to potential barriers concerning its employment in everyday care practices (e.g., digital grey divide). Discussion: While indicating that perspectives on telemedicine are mainly positive, results indicated sacks of resistance in the public sphere and showed that healthcare professionals remain cautious about its potential and – in turn – their attitude might hinder its diffusion.