Adding Multimedia Cues to Medical Providers’ Online Biographies: Do Pictures, Video, and B-Roll Matter?

Abstract

Developing engaging online healthcare provider biographies for prospective patients to consult is becoming a big business. Health-care systems are beginning to add more multichannel components—like videos—to these provider search tools at increasingly higher costs. Prior research finds that prospective patients desire videos offering additional footage (i.e., b-roll) displaying how a provider might interact with a patient during a consultation. Shooting and editing b-roll footage to add to providers’ videos takes additional time and resources. Using predictions and questions generated from uncertainty reduction and cue summation theories, this study sought to determine whether the addition of multichannel media (e.g., a video with added b-roll) offers any greater effects in the form of reduced uncertainty, provider likability, patient satisfaction, or trust than biographies providing fewer multichannel cues. A between-subjects online experiment randomly exposed participants (n = 523) to one of four biographies with increasing levels of multichannel components (i.e., text only biography, text with picture, video, video with b-roll). Results revealed that the two video biographies generated more significant effects than text-only biographies. However, the biography with just the video of the provider (i.e., a-roll only) and the video including added b-roll were not significantly different from one another on any of the dependent variables measured. These findings indicate that there may be a limit to the number of multichannel components needed to be an effective biography to help patients select their next healthcare provider. Both theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed, in addition to future directions for research.

Notes

1. The author thanks the anonymous reviewer who suggested the inclusion of this research question.

2. Biographies can be provided by the author upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evan K. Perrault

Evan K. Perrault (Ph.D.—Michigan State University, 2014) is an assistant professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. His research interests center around developing and evaluating health communication campaigns, as well as investigating information-seeking behaviors and needs of patients to help them effectively choose healthcare providers. He is also interested in the potential value of video content to supplement and enrich traditional print/text information in health-related contexts. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Perrault was a television news reporter for stations in his home state of Wisconsin.