Explicit and implicit association techniques in the medical academic community to assess resistance in the use of medical diagnostic support systems

With the technological evolution in the health field, the development of software that helps the doctor in his decisions about the patient's diagnosis has intensified in recent years. The Medical Diagnosis Support System (SADM) becomes a relevant tool in this process, as it can contribute to better patient care, through a more assertive diagnosis. The objective of this work is to measure possible prejudices/resistance to the use of SADM by a group made up of medical professors and another by medical students from FAPAC/ITPAC Porto, in Porto Nacional, State of Tocantins. For the measurement of explicit memory, a questionnaire developed in this thesis was used, while for the implicit memory, the FreeIAT software was used, which measures the latency of the participant's response, in order to quantify the prejudices of the two groups, regarding the use of the SADM.As part of this work, a graphic post-processor with a friendly interface was also developed, which facilitated the presentation and interpretation of results by FreeIAT users, and which can, or could be, used in any area of interest. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) of the FreeIAT software, used in this work, was customized in order to compare the implicit associations of both medical professors and medical students, in relation to “INFORMATICS” and “MANUSCRIPT”. A pre-test was applied to a group of specialists (medical professors) and their results demonstrated reliability based on the value of Cronbach's Alpha, which was considered good. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the implicit association test, customized FreeIAT, was applied to medical students in the first month of class of the Medical Informatics discipline, taught by the author of this thesis and after four months, when the discipline was concluded, the test was reapplied. The training for this group consisted of exposing the contents covered during the classes, in which the academics became aware of the most varied applications of informatics in the medical field. In this case, it was observed that after teaching the discipline, medical students showed more positive results in relation to “INFORMATICS”. At the same time, the customized FreeIAT was applied to the medical teachers and then a multisensory training was carried out for the participants. Finally, the TAI was reapplied to medical teachers, the results of which showed that multisensory training increased positive associations with “INFORMATICS”. With the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the purpose of this research was expanded, in order to verify if there was an increase in positive associations to “INFORMATICS” for these groups of participants, as the use of digital technologies was intensified in all areas. , due to the need for social distancing as a way to prevent the spread of the virus. Therefore, the same customized IAT and multisensory training used for pre-pandemic data collection was applied to two new groups of medical professors and medical academics.