Abstract
Online reviews generated by patients on physician rating Websites (PRWs) have recently received much attention from physicians and their patients. In these reviews, patients exchange opinions as a diverse set of topics regarding different aspects of healthcare quality. This study aimed to propose a novel service quality-based text analytics (SQTA) model with other qualitative methods to mine different aspects of physicians and their clinical relevance in choosing a good doctor. Data included 45,560 online reviews that the authors scraped from a U.S.-based PRW (Healthgrades.com). The resulting topics demonstrate excellent classification results across different disease ranks, with overall accuracy and recall of 98%. The proposed classifier’s performance was 3% better than the existing topic classification methods applied in previous studies. The resulting clinically informative topics could help patients and physicians to maximize the usefulness of online reviews for efficient clinical decisions and improving the quality of care.
Highlights
This study aimed to propose a novel service quality-based text analytics (SQTA) model with other qualitative methods to mine different aspects of physicians and their clinical relevance in choosing a good doctor
The emergence of social media in healthcare has created a space for interaction in the form of online physician reviews (OPRs)
This study aims to implement a mixed-methods approach to examine different aspects of healthcare service quality while choosing a good doctor by addressing the following research questions (RQs): 1. What do patients express about various aspects of doctors and clinical process on physician rating websites (PRWs)? 2
Summary
The emergence of social media in healthcare has created a space for interaction in the form of online physician reviews (OPRs). Users post OPRs as ratings and textual reviews to grade both doctor and hospitals on physician rating sites (PRWs) These Web-based OPRs reduce uncertainty surrounding the experience, and strongly influence health consumers’ decision-making process to choose a right doctor (Hao & Zhang, 2016). With this significant growth in the reviewing culture in healthcare, PRWs have become unique source of online information for peer-to-peer communication about staff, hospitals’ service quality, and physicians’ education, experience, and specific skills with which they deal The findings suggested that hospital staff (reputation), responsiveness (system efficiency), relationships (doctor-patient communication), and support services (food quality and cleanliness) are critical factors in enhancing the stakeholders’ satisfaction
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