Developing a Framework for Online Review-Based Health Care Service Quality Assessment: Text-Mining Study

Background: With the development of online health care platforms, patient reviews have become an important source for assessing medical service quality. However, the critical aspects of quality dimensions in textual reviews remain largely unexplored. Objective: This study aims to establish a comprehensive medical service quality assessment framework by leveraging online review data. Such a framework would support large service providers, such as online platforms, to assess the quality of many doctors efficiently. Methods: We adopted a text-mining approach with theory-driven topic extraction from online reviews to develop a service quality assessment framework. The framework is based on topic and sentiment classification methods. We conducted an empirical analysis to assess the validity of the framework. Specifically, we examined if patients’ sentiments regarding our extracted dimensions affect demand (number of consultation requests) due to quality signals reflected in these dimensions. Results: We develop a 5-dimensional health care service quality framework (HSQ-5D model). In the empirical study, patient demand is affected by these dimensions, including expertise (coefficient=1.12; P<.001), service delivery process (coefficient=5.60; P<.001), attitude (coefficient=0.82; P<.001), empathy (coefficient=2.65; P<.001), and outcome (coefficient=0.26; P<.001; through patients’ perceived quality from reviews). The 5 dimensions can explain 85.52% of the variance in patient demand, while all information from online reviews can explain 85.67%. The results show the validity and the potential practical value of the proposed HSQ-5D model. Conclusions: This study explores how online reviews can be used to evaluate health care services, offering significant implications for health care management. Theoretically, we extend existing service quality frameworks by integrating text-mining analysis of online reviews, thereby enhancing the understanding of service quality assessment in the digital health context. Practically, the framework can allow health care platforms to identify and reveal doctors’ service quality to reduce patients’ information asymmetry and strengthen patient-provider relationships, ultimately contributing to a more effective and patient-centered health care system.