Topic evolution and sentiment comparison of user reviews on an online medical platform in response to COVID-19: taking review data of Haodf.com as an example

INTRODUCTION: Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many patients have sought medical advice on online medical platforms. Review data have become an essential reference point for supporting users in selecting doctors. As the research object, this study considered Haodf.com, a well-known e-consultation website in China. METHODS: This study examines the topics and sentimental change rules of user review texts from a temporal perspective. We also compared the topics and sentimental change characteristics of user review texts before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. First, 323,519 review data points about 2,122 doctors on Haodf.com were crawled using Python from 2017 to 2022. Subsequently, we employed the latent Dirichlet allocation method to cluster topics and the ROST content mining software to analyze user sentiments. Second, according to the results of the perplexity calculation, we divided text data into five topics: diagnosis and treatment attitude, medical skills and ethics, treatment effect, treatment scheme, and treatment process. Finally, we identified the most important topics and their trends over time. RESULTS: Users primarily focused on diagnosis and treatment attitude, with medical skills and ethics being the second-most important topic among users. As time progressed, the attention paid by users to diagnosis and treatment attitude increased—especially during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, when attention to diagnosis and treatment attitude increased significantly. User attention to the topic of medical skills and ethics began to decline during the COVID-19 outbreak, while attention to treatment effect and scheme generally showed a downward trend from 2017 to 2022. User attention to the treatment process exhibited a declining tendency before the COVID-19 outbreak, but increased after. Regarding sentiment analysis, most users exhibited a high degree of satisfaction for online medical services. However, positive user sentiments showed a downward trend over time, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak. DISCUSSION: This study has reference value for assisting user choice regarding medical treatment, decision-making by doctors, and online medical platform design.