JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemics caused many changes in the primary healthcare systems in Europe. The fast adoption of telemedicine, the shift of healthcare resources to COVID-19 related tasks and the tendency of patients to cancel their non-urgent appointments are some examples of these changes. Patient satisfaction is an important outcome of healthcare services, and the changes caused by COVID-19 in the system may have affected it. Google Maps Reviews provide an important channel for patients to communicate about their experiences regarding the primary healthcare system.

Objective:

Drawing from the research on social media data analytics and text mining, this study sets out to investigate the changes in public sentiment regarding primary healthcare in Finland and Andalusia before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemics.

Methods:

We collected 55043 Google Maps Reviews from locations of primary health care in Finland and Andalusia from the period between 1.1.2011 and 14.5.2024. We first created a filtering mechanism for identifying locations of primary healthcare. After having retrieved the reviews, lexicon-based sentiment analysis using the open-source software Afinn was performed for the Finnish and Spanish language data sets. The numeric user ratings and the results of the sentiment analysis were then analyzed.

Results:

There are important changes in the ratings and sentiment in the data for Andalusia. The median of the ratings shifted from 4 to 1, on a scale of from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum). The median of the normalized sentiment values of the review texts shifted from 4 to 3. Interestingly, changes in numeric ratings and sentiment of the review texts in Finland are only minor and the median values are the same as in Andalusia before the pandemics.

Conclusions:

The change towards a more negative public discussion on primary healthcare in Andalusia during the COVID-19 pandemics is considerable. This can be seen both in the numeric user ratings and in the sentiment analysis of the review text. The implications of this research are multiple. First, we confirmed a positive correlation between the numeric ratings and the sentiment analysis of the textual reviews. Secondly, we illustrated how Google Maps reviews may be used to monitor public opinion for primary healthcare. Further investigations should be performed to find out why the public discussion on primary healthcare in Andalusia has shifted considerably towards negative since the start of the COVID-19 pandemics and why this is not the case for Finland.