Abstract
The transition from paper to electronic-based records in the healthcare industry has posed several challenges to conventional medical practices. The introduction of technology in day-to-day medical and nursing practices deserves careful consideration. In this work, we report the results of a controlled experiment to compare nurses' consultation in emergency calls in six different conditions. We studied the effect that the type of communication media (face-to-face, telephone, videoconference) and type of nursing protocol media (paper-based, electronic-based) can have on consultation time, mistakes made, pauses during consultation, eye contact, and efficacy of the consultation. We found that the type of communication media has an effect on consultation time; on average, fewer mistakes were made during telephone-based consultations; for eye contact, there were significantly fewer eye contacts during face-to-face than during videoconference consultations; finally, the type of communication media or protocol media did not have any effect in the efficacy of the consultation.