JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Background:

Online Q&A (question and answer) communities become popular for people to get information from others, and health is a hot topic on these websites. Patients posting their questions online and receive answers from health professionals.

Objective:

Objective:

This paper aims to explore the information needs of patients and identify what kind of questions raised by patients most. The relationship between characteristics and the number of answers is tested to identify factors may attract more response from physicians.

Methods:

Methods:

Questions were collected from a website named “All questions will be answered” in January 2018. Under the topic of diabetes and hepatitis, we obtained both free and rewarded questions. Two-fold analyses on the data were conducted. First, we performed content analysis on the 7068 (diabetes) and 6685 (hepatitis) textual questions, including free and rewarding ones. The dataset was coded into two schemes_ (1) the description of the patient condition, (2) the topics of questions. Second, we compared the characteristics of free questions and rewarded questions, such as the gender, age of posters and the length of the messages containing questions. The correlation among these characteristics and the number of answers was tested by linear regression analysis.

Results:

Results:

The results demonstrated that three most frequent topics in the question were (1) problems about prevention and examination, (2) diagnosis of the disease, and (3) how to treat the disease. The proportion of the topics varied in different diseases. Descriptions of condition and completely questions were posted most by patients. The average length of rewarded questions was longer than free ones, but the rewarded questions owned fewer answers than free questions. In addition, longer sentences and more reward led to fewer answers.

Conclusions:

Conclusion: Patients concern the treatment and diagnosis most, and a small part of patients lack the ability to raise a complete question. If the patients want more answers from experts, longer sentences and more rewards may not be a good choice. This study contributes to addressing patient’s online health information needs, which in turn benefit both health information consumers and medical professionals. Factors affecting the number of answers are also crucial for information seekers and researchers.