PurposeThis paper aims to reveal the factors patients consider when choosing a doctor for consultation on an online medical consultation (OMC) platform and how these factors influence doctors' consultation volumes.Design/methodology/approachIn Study 1, influencing factors reflected as service features were identified by applying a feature extraction method to physician reviews, and the importance of each feature was determined based on word frequencies and the PageRank algorithm. Sentiment analysis was used to analyze patient satisfaction with each service feature. In Study 2, regression models were used to analyze the relationships between the service features obtained from Study 1 and the doctor's consultation volume.FindingsThe study identified 14 service features of patients' concerns and found that patients mostly care about features such as trust, phraseology, overall service experience, word of mouth and personality traits, all of which describe a doctor's soft skills. These service features affect patients' trust in doctors, which, in turn, affects doctors' consultation volumes.Originality/valueThis research is important as it informs doctors about the features they should improve, to increase their consultation volume on OMC platforms. Furthermore, it not only enriches current trust-related research in the field of OMC, which has a certain reference significance for subsequent research on establishing trust in online doctor–patient relationships, but it also provides a reference for research concerning the antecedents of trust in general.

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