Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Sep 22, 2025)
Date Submitted: Aug 18, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Decoding Patients’ Voices: How Social Media Reviews Reveal the True Impact of Medical Service
ABSTRACT
Background:
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.
Objective:
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.
Methods:
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.
Results:
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.
Conclusions:
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.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.