New Delhi, March 8 A new study by researchers at the Goa Institute of Management (GIM) has found that matching patients with doctors of the same gender in telemedicine may lower patient satisfaction, and has highlighted the need for culturally informed and evidence-based approaches in designing virtual healthcare platforms.
Studies conducted in the past on in-person healthcare settings have shown that patients tend to report higher satisfaction when matched with doctors of the same gender.
However, the new study has found that in virtual consultations, gender concordance between the physician and patient may reduce patient satisfaction.
The findings of the study have been published in the prestigious Journal of Medical Internet Research.
According to Nafisa Vaz, Assistant Professor at GIM, the research contributes evidence-based findings to an area that has remained largely unexamined in India's culturally complex healthcare context.
While gender concordance has traditionally been associated with trust and satisfaction in face-to-face care, it has not previously been studied in telemedicine in India.
To bridge this gap, the study analysed 2,86,196 anonymised teleconsultation records from a nationwide telemedicine provider, covering the period from January 2023 to December 2024, making it one of the largest studies on gender and telemedicine in the Global South, and spanning 20 medical specialities.
"The research team examined whether Gender Concordance (GC) influences patient satisfaction, clinical recovery, as self-reported by patients in a 21-day follow-up survey. The analysis controlled for consultation length, time of consultation, and physician resident level and found these variables to be statistically insignificant," Vaz told