The Doctors, Their Patients, and the Symptom Checker App: Qualitative Interview Study With General Practitioners in Germany

Background: Symptom checkers are designed for laypeople and promise to provide a preliminary diagnosis, a sense of urgency, and a suggested course of action.

Objective: We used the international symptom checker app (SCA) Ada App as an example to answer the following question: How do general practitioners (GPs) experience the SCA in relation to the macro, meso, and micro level of their daily work, and how does this interact with work-related psychosocial resources and demands?

Methods: We conducted 8 semistructured interviews with GPs in Germany between December 2020 and February 2022. We analyzed the data using the integrative basic method, an interpretative-reconstructive method, to identify core themes and modes of thematization.

Results: Although most GPs in this study were open to digitization in health care and their practice, only one was familiar with the SCA. GPs considered the SCA as part of the "unorganized stage" of patients' searching about their conditions. Some preferred it to popular search engines. They considered it relevant to their work as soon as the SCA would influence patients' decisions to see a doctor. Some wanted to see the results of the SCA in advance in order to decide on the patient's next steps. GPs described the diagnostic process as guided by shared decision-making, with the GP taking the lead and the patient deciding. They saw diagnosis as an act of making sense of data, which the SCA would not be able to do, despite the huge amounts of data.

Conclusions: GPs took a techno-pragmatic view of SCA. They operate in a health care system of increasing scarcity. They saw the SCA as a potential work-related resource if it helped them to reduce administrative tasks and unnecessary patient contacts. The SCA was seen as a potential work-related demand if it increased workload, for example, if it increased patients' anxiety, was too risk-averse, or made patients more insistent on their own opinions.