Understanding patients' WOM of IT-Enabled healthcare service: A case study of online health consultation

Abstract

In healthcare context, the service delivery and information management are facilitated via varieties of IT-Enabled collaborative platforms. The effect of IT-Enabled collaboration health service has been extensively explored in recent decades. However, few studies have investigated the IT-Enabled health service from the perspective of patients or health consumers. Our research fills this research gap through a case study of an online health consultation website. The review systems on the website enable patients to write their word of mouth about services and physicians, thus providing us with a material to understand the interests, motivations and expectations of patients. In this work, we utilize four text-analysis techniques: term frequency analysis, sentiment analysis, feature words clustering and topic modelling to mining information from the textual WOM of patients. The results of our research have both theoretical and practical implications for optimizing the IT-Enabled health service, maintaining a harmonious physician-patients' relationship and increasing patients'satisfaction.