Understanding the effects of doctors’ online profile pictures on patients’ decision-making

The effect of doctors’ profile pictures in online healthcare platforms has been investigated in prior research. However, little attention has focused on professional signals conveyed by doctors’ online profile pictures. To address the above-mentioned gap, this study examines the roles of doctors’ profile pictures in patients’ online decision-making based on cue utilization theory and impression management theory. Our research finds that a picture indicating professional information (e.g., professional attire and professional background) matters in attracting patients’ interest and their decision-making. However, the impacts of professional information change according to patients’ illness severity. Specifically, patients with low-severity illnesses care more about professional attire in the stage of glancing physicians, while patients with high-severity illnesses care more about professional attire in the stage of decision making. These findings contribute to the domain knowledge of online service design and delivery, especially in the arena of online health services

Why Do Consumers Review Doctors Online? Topic Modeling Analysis of Positive and Negative Reviews on an Online Health Community in China

Consumers often learn from others through a social learning process (e.g. electronic word of mouth) before making decisions. From the e-business perspective, online reviews have changed how people select products and services, and no doubt it is the same in the e-health sector. In this study, we examine online reviews of patients and health consumers for their doctors in an online health consultation platform in China. We combine machine learning and qualitative techniques to derive the themes of online reviews and the factors leading to positive and negative reviews. Our analysis demonstrates that service levels of hospitals, doctors’ communication skills and their professional skills influence the sentiment of reviews. Our findings offer important insights into theories and practice for studying online reviews in the healthcare context

Topic evolution and sentiment comparison of user reviews on an online medical platform in response to COVID-19: taking review data of Haodf.com as an example

IntroductionThroughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many patients have sought medical advice on online medical platforms. Review data have become an essential reference point for supporting users in selecting doctors. As the research object, this study considered Haodf.com, a well-known e-consultation website in China.MethodsThis study examines the topics and sentimental change rules of user review texts from a temporal perspective. We also compared the topics and sentimental change characteristics of user review texts before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. First, 323,519 review data points about 2,122 doctors on Haodf.com were crawled using Python from 2017 to 2022. Subsequently, we employed the latent Dirichlet allocation method to cluster topics and the ROST content mining software to analyze user sentiments. Second, according to the results of the perplexity calculation, we divided text data into five topics: diagnosis and treatment attitude, medical skills and ethics, treatment effect, treatment scheme, and treatment process. Finally, we identified the most important topics and their trends over time.ResultsUsers primarily focused on diagnosis and treatment attitude, with medical skills and ethics being the second-most important topic among users. As time progressed, the attention paid by users to diagnosis and treatment attitude increased—especially during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, when attention to diagnosis and treatment attitude increased significantly. User attention to the topic of medical skills and ethics began to decline during the COVID-19 outbreak, while attention to treatment effect and scheme generally showed a downward trend from 2017 to 2022. User attention to the treatment process exhibited a declining tendency before the COVID-19 outbreak, but increased after. Regarding sentiment analysis, most users exhibited a high degree of satisfaction for online medical services. However, positive user sentiments showed a downward trend over time, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak.DiscussionThis study has reference value for assisting user choice regarding medical treatment, decision-making by doctors, and online medical platform design

Is Pre-consultation Conducted by the Assistant Physician Effective in Improving Online Healthcare Service Quality and Satisfaction?

To improve online healthcare quality and efficiency, online healthcare communities (OHCs) enabled the pre-consultation function, in which an assistant physician interacts with the patient to understand and document the patient’s health conditions, medical history, and consultation objectives prior to the formal online consultation with the attending physician. Using detailed service data from a Chinese OHC, this study scrutinizes the effect of using pre-consultation on online healthcare service quality and satisfaction. The results show that pre-consultation can significantly increase the attending physician’s response speed, length, and the level of informational support embedded within the response, while maintaining a consistent level of emotional support. Despite the improvement in service quality, pre-consultation leads to decreased patient satisfaction with the consultation service. Furthermore, we find that pre-consultation improves service quality by enhancing the professionalism and comprehensiveness of patient case information and reducing information seeking and clarification of the attending physician with the patient

The Effect of Online Follow-up Services on Offline and Online Physician Demand: Evidence from Chronic Disease Physicians

The adoption of online follow-up services by physicians provides their offline patients with an important channel for medical follow-ups. Using detailed service data from a Chinese online healthcare community (OHC), the present study scrutinizes the rarely studied effect of adopting online follow-up services on offline and online physician demand in the context of chronic disease. The results demonstrate that adopting online follow-up services leads to higher offline physician demand. Interestingly, in contrast to the channel substitution effect documented in the literature, we find that providing online follow-up services also increases online physician demand. Furthermore, the results of mechanism tests reveal that online follow-up services affect online demand by boosting physicians’ online exposure and increasing the availability of information on their online service characteristics to patients. Our findings offer strategic guidance for physicians, design implications for OHCs, and insights for healthcare policymakers

Stories in isolation: The impact of gene discovery on families and professionals

This thesis examines the impact of the 1992 myotonic dystrophy gene discovery on families, clinicians, and a team of scientists who played a key role in the successful international research collaboration. The gene isolation resulted in a diagnostic test but not, as yet, treatment or cure. The scientific team, now dispersed, and families attending the myotonic dystrophy clinic were interviewed, and the myotonic dystrophy medical record archive was examined. Reflexive practice enabled the research strategy to adapt to emergent themes. A broad repertoire of qualitative methods was used to explore the data from these varied sources. Documentary traces in the archive captured research and service trajectories, from the grounding of scientific success in relationships between home, clinic and laboratory, to the contemporary management of myotonic dystrophy where bureaucracy and technology are visible but clinical expertise predominates. Through vivid recollections and use of narrative devices the scientists reconstructed a unique era in clinical genetic research. An emotional register, privileging relationships and the grounding of scientific advance in everyday laboratory work, distinguished their accounts. This language revealed subtle differences between narratives, where there was universal recognition of the importance of the discovery for a scientific career, but ambivalence regarding its personal meaning for some key actors. For families, gene discovery represented hope for future generations while personal meaning was located in the maintenance of valued roles of everyday life. The accounts narrated the challenges of adapting to an uncertain prognosis despite definitive diagnosis. Vocabularies of strength were at variance with physical weakness highlighting the significance of narrative analysis as both method and representation of meaning. Analysis of gene discovery revealed complex interpretations of meaning for the scientists, multiple representations of myotonic dystrophy across the data sources, and the gene test, rather than gene isolation, as a key turning point for families

Stories in isolation : the impact of gene discovery on families and professionals

This thesis examines the impact of the 1992 myotonic dystrophy gene discovery on families, clinicians, and a team of scientists who played a key role in the successful international research collaboration. The gene isolation resulted in a diagnostic test but not, as yet, treatment or cure. The scientific team, now dispersed, and families attending the myotonic dystrophy clinic were interviewed, and the myotonic dystrophy medical record archive was examined. Reflexive practice enabled the research strategy to adapt to emergent themes. A broad repertoire of qualitative methods was used to explore the data from these varied sources. Documentary traces in the archive captured research and service trajectories, from the grounding of scientific success in relationships between home, clinic and laboratory, to the contemporary management of myotonic dystrophy where bureaucracy and technology are visible but clinical expertise predominates. Through vivid recollections and use of narrative devices the scientists reconstructed a unique era in clinical genetic research. An emotional register, privileging relationships and the grounding of scientific advance in everyday laboratory work, distinguished their accounts. This language revealed subtle differences between narratives, where there was universal recognition of the importance of the discovery for a scientific career, but ambivalence regarding its personal meaning for some key actors. For families, gene discovery represented hope for future generations while personal meaning was located in the maintenance of valued roles of everyday life. The accounts narrated the challenges of adapting to an uncertain prognosis despite definitive diagnosis. Vocabularies of strength were at variance with physical weakness highlighting the significance of narrative analysis as both method and representation of meaning. Analysis of gene discovery revealed complex interpretations of meaning for the scientists, multiple representations of myotonic dystrophy across the data sources, and the gene test, rather than gene isolation, as a key turning point for families.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Social Media and Public Health: Opportunities and Challenges

Social media has the potential to provide rapid insights into unfolding public health emergencies such as infectious disease outbreaks. They can also be drawn upon for rapid, survey-based insights into various health topics. Social media has also been utilised by medical professionals for the purposes of sharing scholarly works, international collaboration, and engaging in policy debates. One benefit of using social media platforms to gain insight into health is that they have the ability to capture unfiltered public opinion in large volumes, avoiding the potential biases introduced by surveys or interviews. Social media platforms can also be utilised to pilot surveys, for instance, though the use of Twitter polls. Social media data have also been drawn upon in medical emergencies and crisis situations as a public health surveillance tool. A number of software and online tools also exist, developed specifically to aide public health research utilising social media data. In recent years, ethical issues regarding the retrieval and analysis of data have also arisen