Online Forum Authenticity: Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

Abstract

It is difficult to discern the authenticity online reviews, which is critical particularly in a setting of patient-doctor online forum. In this paper, a model on the detection of doctor quality has been developed and tested with online big data. In this study, a database with 31,646 online reviews was compiled. Text mining and word-cloud analysis results indicate that the model provides an effective solution to assess the quality of doctors registered in online forum, the quality of doctor-patient online interaction, and patients' overall perception. A guideline has been provided to evaluate doctor authenticity.