Predicting Patients' Satisfaction With Doctors in Online Medical Communities

Abstract

Online medical communities have revolutionized the way patients obtain medical-related information and services. Investigating what factors might influence patients’ satisfaction with doctors and predicting their satisfaction can help patients narrow down their choices and increase their loyalty towards online medical communities. Considering the imbalanced feature of dataset collected from Good Doctor, we integrated XGBoost and SMOTE algorithm to examine what factors and these factors can be used to predict patient satisfaction. SMOTE algorithm addresses the imbalanced issue by oversampling imbalanced classification datasets. And XGBoost algorithm is an ensemble of decision trees algorithm where new trees fix errors of existing trees. The experimental results demonstrate that SMOTE and XGBoost algorithm can achieve better performance. We further analyzed the role of features played in satisfaction prediction from two levels: individual feature level and feature combination level.

Predicting User Satisfaction of Mobile Healthcare Services Using Machine Learning

“…Chatterjee et al (2021) employed XGBoost for computing product reviews and attained best outcomes with forecasting user satisfaction among other classifiers (e.g., random forest). In addition, Xu et al (2022) applied XGBoost for analyzing users' comments towards doctors and achieved advanced results in predicting patients' satisfaction. Hew et al (2020) revealed that examining online reviews with GBM has a great power (F1 score: 0.8375) in forecasting user satisfaction with online learnings.…”

How COVID-19 Affects the Willingness of the Elderly to Continue to Use the Online Health Community

“…Users share knowledge, and member exchanges and other activities occur in the community, about health-or treatment-related issues (Wu & Lu, 2016). In contrast with traditional doctor-centered medical and health service model, OHCs provide users with an open network service platform for experience sharing, information exchange, and asking questions on health care-related issues (Xu, Wu, & Chen, 2022). OHCs with professional doctors also reduce the cost to patients seeking health information and medical assistance, and provide hospitals with opportunities to expand their market.…”