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Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data

Online medical consultation (OMC) allows doctors and patients to communicate with each other in an online synchronous or asynchronous setting. Unlike face-to-face consultations in which doctors are only passively chosen by patients with appointments, doctors engaging in voluntary online consultation...

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Autores principales: Lu, Yingjie, Wang, Qian
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9408688/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36011092
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10081435
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author Lu, Yingjie
Wang, Qian
author_facet Lu, Yingjie
Wang, Qian
author_sort Lu, Yingjie
collection PubMed
description Online medical consultation (OMC) allows doctors and patients to communicate with each other in an online synchronous or asynchronous setting. Unlike face-to-face consultations in which doctors are only passively chosen by patients with appointments, doctors engaging in voluntary online consultation have the option of choosing patients they hope to treat when faced with a large number of online questions from patients. It is necessary to characterize doctors’ preferences for patient selection in OMC, which can contribute to their more active participation in OMC services. We proposed to exploit a bipartite graph to describe the doctor–patient interaction and use an exponential random graph model (ERGM) to analyze the doctors’ preferences for patient selection. A total of 1404 doctor–patient consultation data retrieved from an online medical platform in China were used for empirical analysis. It was found that first, mildly ill patients will be prioritized by doctors, but the doctors with more professional experience may be more likely to prefer more severely ill patients. Second, doctors appear to be more willing to provide consultation services to patients from urban areas, but the doctors with more professional experience or from higher-quality hospitals give higher priority to patients from rural and medically underserved areas. Finally, doctors generally prefer asynchronous communication methods such as picture/text consultation, while the doctors with more professional experience may be more willing to communicate with patients via synchronous communication methods, such as voice consultation or video consultation.
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spelling pubmed-94086882022-08-26 Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data Lu, Yingjie Wang, Qian Healthcare (Basel) Article Online medical consultation (OMC) allows doctors and patients to communicate with each other in an online synchronous or asynchronous setting. Unlike face-to-face consultations in which doctors are only passively chosen by patients with appointments, doctors engaging in voluntary online consultation have the option of choosing patients they hope to treat when faced with a large number of online questions from patients. It is necessary to characterize doctors’ preferences for patient selection in OMC, which can contribute to their more active participation in OMC services. We proposed to exploit a bipartite graph to describe the doctor–patient interaction and use an exponential random graph model (ERGM) to analyze the doctors’ preferences for patient selection. A total of 1404 doctor–patient consultation data retrieved from an online medical platform in China were used for empirical analysis. It was found that first, mildly ill patients will be prioritized by doctors, but the doctors with more professional experience may be more likely to prefer more severely ill patients. Second, doctors appear to be more willing to provide consultation services to patients from urban areas, but the doctors with more professional experience or from higher-quality hospitals give higher priority to patients from rural and medically underserved areas. Finally, doctors generally prefer asynchronous communication methods such as picture/text consultation, while the doctors with more professional experience may be more willing to communicate with patients via synchronous communication methods, such as voice consultation or video consultation. MDPI 2022-07-30 /pmc/articles/PMC9408688/ /pubmed/36011092 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10081435 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Lu, Yingjie
Wang, Qian
Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data
title Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data
title_full Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data
title_fullStr Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data
title_full_unstemmed Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data
title_short Doctors’ Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor–Patient Consultation Data
title_sort doctors’ preferences in the selection of patients in online medical consultations: an empirical study with doctor–patient consultation data
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9408688/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36011092
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10081435
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