Data Mining of the Reviews from Online Private Doctors

Background: User-generated content shared in the online health communities (OHCs) is becoming a valuable resource for researchers to understand patients’ decision-making behaviors in the management of their health. Many studies have focused on how to obtain useful information from online reviews in OHCs.

Introduction: This study focuses on a telemedicine service called Online Private Doctor (OPD), which is offered by a leading Chinese physician review website (PRW). OPD reviews have not received much attention. By data mining the reviews, our goal is to determine what patients are talking about when they use the OPD service and whether they are satisfied with the service or not.

Materials and Methods: We used a Python web crawler to collect 41,029 reviews and 84,510 short reviews (labels) of all 5,645 physicians who offered the OPD service on a PRW (haodf.com) in China. Mixed methods (i.e., a literature review, topic discovery, annotation, and a sentiment analysis) were used to determine the information that the OPD reviews are meant to express.

Results: We discovered that the OPD reviews can be categorized into four subjects: competence (35.1%), communication (29.4%), treatment (26.0%), and convenience (9.5%). In terms of previously discovered topics, we found that competence, communication, and treatment have been discussed before, but convenience is an emerging subject. The sentiment analysis indicated that 93.67% of the reviews indicated positive emotions, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is 0.64. Furthermore, the labels indicated that only 0.72% (603/84,570) of reviews were negative toward the OPD service. The subjects of the labels were distributed according to competence (34.7%), communication (23.8%), treatment (33.5%), and convenience (8.0%).

Discussion: The findings of our study suggest that patients who ever used OPD have been quite satisfied with the service. From their reviews, we discovered that OPD has its special characteristics and is convenient. However, it still has some shortcomings, for example, the quality of the phone connection. In terms of both the platform and the doctors, more efforts should be made to make the OPD better and more regulated.

Conclusion: OPD is an emerging telemedicine service that still needs more time and space to evolve. For patients, it helps reduce problems such as scheduling and queuing. Therefore, it brings more convenience to people’s daily lives. In the future, more attention should be paid to this service, as it is helpful in reducing the uneven distribution of medical resources.