Reconstructing the Patient-Physician Relationship Following the Shift in Medical Paradigms Within Digital Healthcare

This study examines how the core components of the patient-physician relationship are reshaped amid paradigm shifts in healthcare driven by digital transformation and proposes a normative framework for desirable patient-physician relationships in the digital healthcare era.A comprehensive literature review was conducted, encompassing foundational principles of medical ethics and recent empirical studies addressing digital healthcare environments.Based on this review, three core elements determining the quality of patient-physician relationships-autonomy, trust, and communication-were identified and comparatively analyzed across traditional medical and digital healthcare paradigms.In the traditional medical paradigm grounded in medical paternalism, patient autonomy was constrained by information asymmetry, unidirectional communication, and barriers to access, while trust was largely rooted in physician authority and communication remained episodic and face-toface.In contrast, digital healthcare expands patient autonomy through the democratization of health information, telemedicine, shared decision-making tools, and wearable technologies, while enabling continuous, multi-channel communication and reshaping the physician's role toward that of a facilitator supporting informed decision-making.However, digital healthcare also introduces ethical and relational challenges, including risks of depersonalization, automation bias, increased complexity of trust, widening inequalities driven by the digital divide, and concerns regarding privacy and commercial exploitation of health data.To address these challenges, this study highlights the need to establish hybrid care models, strengthen digital health literacy, develop human-centered ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence (AI), and ensure patient-participatory and inclusive system design.In the digital healthcare era, the desirable patient-physician relationship is best characterized as a trust-based collaborative partnership, which is expected to evolve into a patient-AIphysician triadic model in which AI functions as augmented intelligence that enhances, rather than replaces, physicians' clinical capacities.Ultimately, this framework emphasizes humanizing healthcare through technology by reinforcing patient autonomy, trust, and relational ethics within increasingly digitalized clinical environments.