Page 164 - GHES-3-2

Global Health Economics and
Sustainability

ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Sentiment and concern evaluation using online

health community reviews

Chen Wang and Huiying Qi*
Department of Health Informatics and Management, School of Health Humanities, Peking University,
Beijing, China

Abstract
In the online health community (OHC), each patient review of doctors includes
an evaluation and an emotional attitude toward the doctor. Subsequent patients
usually browse the comments of other patients about doctors when choosing a
doctor and subsequently make decisions based on these reviews. Through sentiment
analysis, a user’s emotional orientation can be judged from the review, enabling
an understanding of patients’ emotional tendencies and main concerns regarding
doctors during medical treatment. This also provides a reference for OHC doctors to
improve service quality. This study used a method based on a sentiment dictionary to
analyze the sentiment value of reviews and selected three different types of diseases
(diabetes, leukemia, and depression) as examples from user reviews of the “Good
Academic editor: Doctor Online” community. SnowNLP, a Python library for Chinese natural language
Mihajlo Jakovljevic M.D. Ph.D. MAE processing, was used to realize the sentiment analysis of the reviews. The program
*Corresponding author: correctly identified the sentiment of most reviews. Although the sentiments of OHC
Huiying Qi reviews are mostly positive, there are also a few extremely negative reviews. Most
(qhy@bjmu.edu.cn) positive patient reviews about doctors are related to their good attitude and patience
Citation: Wang, C. & Qi, H. (2025). with patients and their condition.
Sentiment and concern evaluation
using online health community
reviews. Global Health Econ Keywords: Online health community; Patient review data; Sentiments; Sentiment
Sustain, 3(2):156-166.
https://doi.org/10.36922/ghes.7052 analysis; Sentiment dictionary-based
Received: December 5, 2024
Revised: January 5, 2025
1. Introduction
Accepted: February 10, 2025
The profound integration of Internet technology with the health-care industry
Published online: February 25,
2025 has led to the emergence of online health care, a quintessential example of the
“Internet + Medical” service model, which is being increasingly adopted. Online
Copyright: © 2025 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article health communities (OHCs) are composed of medical professionals, patients, and
distributed under the terms of the individuals seeking health-related information. These communities transcend
Creative Commons Attribution temporal and geographical boundaries, optimize the consolidation of medical
License, permitting distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, resources, and facilitate interactions between patients and health-care providers (Wu
provided the original work is et al., 2017). OHCs offer a valuable platform where individuals can search for health
properly cited. information, share experiences regarding disease treatments, and seek emotional
Publisher’s Note: AccScience support. Given that OHCs connect doctors and patients through digital networks,
Publishing remains neutral with delays in information feedback from both parties are not uncommon. Timely
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional evaluation and feedback from patients are crucial for doctors to enhance the quality
affiliations. of subsequent medical services.

Volume 3 Issue 2 (2025) 156 https://doi.org/10.36922/ghes.7052