According to a new report by Cisco, 74 per cent of consumers are comfortable with communicating with their doctor via text, email or video rather than seeing them in person.

Cisco’s Customer Experience Report studies the views of consumers and what the company terms healthcare decision markets, or HCDMs, on three issues: in-person medical consultation versus remote care, sharing personal health data and using technology to make recommendations on personal health.

Views on these topics differed widely between the two groups and across the ten geographies surveyed, said Cisco.

The survey was conducted in early 2013 and included responses from more than 1,500 consumers and HCDMs across ten countries.

On sharing personal medical information, healthcare practitioners are more willing to share than patients, although the picture varies country by country.

Most consumers are comfortable with storing their health records on cloud infrastructure, except for those in Germany and Japan, said the report.

Meanwhile, nearly 80 per cent of North American consumers are happy to send medical histories and diagnoses to healthcare providers, if it leads to the best diagnosis possible. In contrast, half of Japanese users did not want to share DNA information electronically.

The largest discrepancy on the data protection issue was in Brazil where about two thirds of consumers felt safeguards were adequate in their country while about eight in ten HCDMs do not agree.