The Voice of Drug Consumers: Online Textual Review Analysis Using Structural Topic Model.

Lifeng He,Zheng Qu,Xiaohang Zhou,Dongmei Han

doi:10.3390/ijerph17103648

Abstract

Many web-based pharmaceutical e-commerce platforms allow consumers to post open-ended textual reviews based on their purchase experiences. Understanding the true voice of consumers by analyzing such a large amount of user-generated content is of great significance to pharmaceutical manufacturers and e-commerce websites. The aim of this paper is to automatically extract hidden topics from web-based drug reviews using the structural topic model (STM) to examine consumers’ concerns when they buy drugs online. The STM is a probabilistic extension of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which allows the consolidation of document-level covariates. This innovation allows us to capture consumer dissatisfaction along with their dynamics over time. We extract 12 topics, and five of them are negative topics representing consumer dissatisfaction, whose appearances in the negative reviews are substantially higher than those in the positive reviews. We also come to the conclusion that the prevalence of these five negative topics has not decreased over time. Furthermore, our results reveal that the prevalence of price-related topics has decreased significantly in positive reviews, which indicates that low-price strategies are becoming less attractive to customers. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first study using STM to analyze the unstructured textual data of drug reviews, which enhances the understanding of the aspects of drug consumer concerns and contributes to the research of pharmaceutical e-commerce literature.

Highlights

In the late 1990s, the first online pharmacy appeared in the United States, selling over-the-counter and prescription drugs
To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first study using structural topic model (STM) to analyze the unstructured textual data of drug reviews, which enhances the understanding of the aspects of drug consumer concerns and contributes to the research of pharmaceutical e-commerce literature
Based on the unique advantages of the STM, we reveal consumer dissatisfaction and describe the changing trend of these consumer concerns over time

Summary

Introduction

In the late 1990s, the first online pharmacy appeared in the United States, selling over-the-counter and prescription drugs. By 2009, there were about 3000 websites selling prescription drugs, and this number had increased to 35,000 in 2016 [1]. More and more patients are buying drugs through pharmaceutical e-commerce sites. In China, with the rapid progress of internet technology and the change in consumers’ shopping habits, pharmaceutical e-commerce sites have developed rapidly. From 2012 to 2016, the total transaction volume of drug B2C (Business To Customer) business increased by nearly 10 times in China, with a compound annual growth rate of 77.2%, and reached about 28 billion dollars in 2016. With the promotion of pharmaceutical enterprises and e-commerce websites, it is estimated that drug B2C business will maintain a high compound annual growth rate of

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