Online health community—An empirical analysis based on grounded theory and entropy weight TOPSIS method to evaluate the service quality

INTRODUCTION: With the enhancement of people's health awareness and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in recent years, people's demand for online health information continues to expand, and online health communities (OHCs) have developed rapidly. However, the service quality of OHCs is uneven, and problems such as content quality, privacy disclosure are increasingly prominent. It's of great significance to establish normalized OHC service quality evaluation standards and develop effective evaluation tools and methods for the improvement of OHC service quality. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Based on the grounded theory, the raw materials obtained from semi-structured interviews were coded in three stages to construct a service quality evaluation system for OHC. Through empirical analysis, the rationality and effectiveness of the evaluation system were verified. Then six representative Chinese OHCs were selected and their service quality was evaluated by the entropy weight TOPSIS method. RESULTS: The service quality evaluation system of OHC was constructed which includes 4 first-level indicators and 16 second-level indicators. The weights of the first-level indicators from large to small are content quality, emotional experience quality, interaction quality and function quality. Among the second-level indicator weights, the top three are perceived cost reasonableness, content professionalism and effectiveness of interactive content. CONCLUSIONS: The indicator system is reasonable and effective and the evaluation method has strong applicability and operability. This study will provide theoretical guidance for community platform operators and relevant departments to design effective evaluation mechanism of OHC service quality, offering a reference for decisions and policymakers.