Decoding Patients’ Voices: How Social Media Reviews Reveal the True Impact of Medical Service (Preprint)

<sec> <title>BACKGROUND</title> Background: An increasing number of patients are posting information about their medical experience on social media, which constitutes a valuable information resource with the potential to improve medical services and patients' medical experience. </sec> <sec> <title>OBJECTIVE</title> Objective: By analyzing the content of patients' medical reviews posted on social media, this study aims to explore the aspects of medical services that users focus on, their focal points, emotional tendencies, and changing trends. </sec> <sec> <title>METHODS</title> Methods: This study targets several top large general tertiary hospitals in China. It collects and organizes the text content of patients' medical experience reviews about these hospitals on a well-known domestic online review website. Using the text analysis software ROST CM 6.0 combined with Python programming, it conducts collection, high-frequency word analysis, semantic network analysis, sentiment analysis, and trend analysis of patients' online reviews. </sec> <sec> <title>RESULTS</title> Results: Patients pay the highest attention to the service attitude of medical staff and the convenience of medical treatment. The quality of medical services that patients care about centers on service attitude and service convenience, and extends to other related elements. Patients' emotional tendencies towards medical services are approximately half positive and half negative; positive emotions are concentrated in aspects such as appointments and hardware, while negative emotions are focused on process order and doctor-patient communication. Patients' concerns and emotional tendencies show certain regular changes over time. </sec> <sec> <title>CONCLUSIONS</title> Conclusions: Patients' online reviews focus on non-technical factors such as attitude, processes, and waiting time, with less attention to technical factors such as treatment effects. Positive and negative emotions each account for approximately half, with negative emotions slightly exceeding positive ones, indicating the impact of non-technical factors on the medical experience. While focusing on professional technology, top large medical institutions should also strive to improve service attitude, language communication, convenient processes, and medical experience. Analyzing online medical review content provides a new method and perspective for studying patient satisfaction and improving medical services. </sec>