JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With the widespread application of mobile health technologies in health care field, the medical error is dramatically ameliorated, and the patient experience increasingly gains improvement. Among others, WeChat official account (WOA), as a main communication and service tool in medical services, has been widely adopted in the hospital in China. However, owing to the diversity of the functionality items of WOA, little was known about the major composition, as well as the influencing factors of WeChat communication index (WCI).

Objective:

There are two typical WOAs, namely WeChat subscription account (WSSA) and WeChat service account (WSVA). The aim of this study was to explore functionality composition of WSVA adopted by tertiary hospitals with level-A in China, and the major contributors of the WCI score.

Methods:

A total of 681 tertiary hospitals with level-A were selected from the health quality monitoring system developed by the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China (NHC-PRC); the WOA of every tertiary hospital was retrieved in WeChat application. We divided the core functionality items of WSVA using categorical principal component Analysis (CATPCA). In order to elicit the factors which influence the acceptance and validity of WSVA, the quantile regression was employed to analyze the WCI.

Results:

A total of 668 WOAs were identified, adopted by the tertiary hospitals with level-A in China. The adoption of WSVAs (543/668, 81.29%) is more than that of WeChat subscription account (WSSA) (125/668, 18.71%) in the tertiary hospitals with level-A in China. The functionality items of WSVA were eventually categorized into four clusters, namely hospital introduction, medical services, visiting assistant and others. As to the influencing factors of WCI, the impact of the activity index of WSVA and the total visiting number of outpatient and emergency on WCI is statistically significant and positive at all quantiles. However, the year of certification, the type of hospital, the type of the region, the year of public hospital reform involved, and the number of beds had merely effect on WCI at some quantiles.

Conclusions:

Our study has presented the functionality composition and distribution of WSVA adopted by the tertiary hospitals with level-A in China, which is helpful for the tertiary hospitals to develop some in-depth functionality items so as to further improve the patient experience. Furthermore, the analysis of factors influencing the WCI shows that the hospital should also take full advantage of the times of posting tweets and pay more attention to provide high quality tweets, to meet the various needs of patients.