Managing Doctors from a Healthy Distance: The role of altered professional identity in shaping doctors' perceptions of managerial control in a telemedicine context

Abstract: Professional Identities and how they change is an established field of research and has received significant attention from academia and practitioners in recent years. The research to date includes specific classifications of doctors' professional identities and how they change but has yet to focus on telemedicine's impacts, an increasingly prominent feature of the healthcare landscape. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how doctors' professional identities change in a telemedicine context, identify the sub-components of identities, and observe how they impact doctors' relationships with their organization's management. To accomplish this, the authors conducted a qualitative study involving doctors from 5 separate countries and using semi-structured interviews to capture individual perceptions of doctor's professional identities to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of how such identities change in a telemedicine setting as well its implications for doctors' relationship with management. The study's findings suggest that doctors' professional identities have unique and separate aspects with varying degrees of centrality to their sense of self. More central aspects are more resistant to the changes induced by the movement to a telemedicine context. Additionally, our findings suggest that certain contextual factors, such as the institutional pressure exerted on doctors to change, also impact the degree of identity change that will occur. This study extends the doctor professional identity framework presented by Mishra et al. (2012) and the theoretical understanding of professional identity change in new contexts, generating valuable insights for practitioners relating to how constraining actions can be assessed and implemented in a modern healthcare context.