Exploring the Impact of Linguistic Signals Transmission on Patients’ Health Consultation Choice: Web Mining of Online Reviews

Background: Patients face difficulties identifying appropriate physicians owing to the sizeable quantity and uneven quality of information in physician rating websites. Therefore, an increasing dependence of consumers on online platforms as a source of information for decision-making has given rise to the need for further research into the quality of information in the form of online physician reviews (OPRs). Methods: Drawing on the signaling theory, this study develops a theoretical model to examine how linguistic signals (affective signals and informative signals) in physician rating websites affect consumers’ decision making. The hypotheses are tested using 5521 physicians’ six-month data drawn from two leading health rating platforms in the U.S (i.e., Healthgrades.com and Vitals.com) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A sentic computing-based sentiment analysis framework is used to implicitly analyze patients’ opinions regarding their treatment choice. Results: The results indicate that negative sentiment, review readability, review depth, review spelling, and information helpfulness play a significant role in inducing patients’ decision-making. The influence of negative sentiment, review depth on patients’ treatment choice was indirectly mediated by information helpfulness. Conclusions: This paper is a first step toward the understanding of the linguistic characteristics of information relating to the patient experience, particularly the emerging field of online health behavior and signaling theory. It is also the first effort to our knowledge that employs sentic computing-based sentiment analysis in this context and provides implications for practice.