JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The internet hospitals in China are in urgent demand due to limited and unevenly distributed healthcare resources, lack of family doctors, increased burdens of chronic diseases, and rapid growth of the aged population. The epidemic COVID-19 catalyzed the expansion of online healthcare services. In recent years, internet hospitals were developed rapidly. As the largest online medical entrance in China, Ping An Good Doctor was a national, widely used application providing online healthcare services.

Objective:

This study aims to give a comprehensive description of the characteristics of the online consultations and inquisitions in Ping An Good Doctor. The analyses tried to answer: (1) what are the characteristics of consultations in the Ping An Good Doctor in terms of departments and disease profiles? (2) who would use the online health services most frequently? (3) how is the user experience for the online consultations of the Ping An Good Doctor?

Methods:

A total of 35.3 million consultations and inquisitions in one year were analyzed with respect to the distributions of departments and diseases, the users’ portrait, and the consulting behaviors.

Results:

The geographical distribution of the usage of Ping An Good Doctor showed Shandong (18.4%), Yunnan (15.6%), Shaanxi (7.2%), and Guangdong (5.5%) were the lead provinces, which accounted for 46.6% of the total consultations and inquisitions. In terms of department distribution, we found gynecology and obstetrics (19.2%), dermatology (17.0%), and pediatrics (14.4%) were the top 3 popular departments in Ping An Good Doctor. The disease distribution analysis showed expect for the non-disease specific consultations, acute upper respiratory infection (4.1%), pregnancy (2.8%), and dermatitis (2.4%) were the most frequently consulted diseases. In terms of user portrait, females (60.4%) aged between 19 and 35 were most likely to consult online in general. The users’ behavior analyses showed the peak hours for online consultations occurred at 10:00, 15:00, and 21:00 of the day. As for the user experience, 93% of users’ feedbacks had score 5 on a 5-Likert satisfaction scale. And for some disease-related health problems, such as acute upper respiratory infection (AURI), dermatitis, and eczema, the feedback scores were above the average.

Conclusions:

The popularity of internet hospitals, such as Ping An Good Doctor, suggested there were needs for the high quality of healthcare services which broke the geographical limitations. Our analyses showed the non-disease specific questions and moderate health problems were much more frequently consulted than the severe clinical conditions, suggested the internet hospitals played the role of a family doctor, which helped to relieve the stress of offline hospitals and facilitated people’s life. Besides, the Ping An Good Doctor had a good user experience in general, especially for disease-related inquisitions, suggesting online health services can solve health problems.