Online patient education design features: are there any differences in opinion based on consumer’s stage of change?

Abstract: Patients’ stage of change towards their disease management plays an important role in healthcare. The aim of this study is to explore whether there are any differences in the patients’ perceptions toward the design features of online patient education according to the patients’ stages of change. Patients and carers who use chronic disease websites from Australia were invited to participate in the study to understand their perspectives on the design features. The statistical analysis package for the social science 19.0 (SPSS 19.0) and Smart PLS were used to perform statistical analysis for answering the research questions and related hypotheses. The results indicated that the patients’ perceptions tended to differ in terms of online patient education design features, interpretability and presentation of content, according to their stages of change. The patients, across different stages of change, did have differing perceptions regarding certain constructs within the online patient education design features.