Impact of patient engagement types on doctors’ service provision in online health communities

IF 2.9 2区医学 Q2 PUBLIC, ENVIRONMENTAL & OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH

Patient Education and Counseling Pub Date : 2025-02-07 DOI:10.1016/j.pec.2025.108700

Wei Zhang , Jingwen Xuan , Mingxuan Cai , Magdalena Kludacz-Alessandri , Richard Evans

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Objectives

Online Health Communities (OHCs) contributes to patient access to health information and doctor-patient communication. However, how patient engagement types influence doctor service provision in OHCs remains unclear.

Methods

With the PACE system, this study employs content analysis and clustering methods to examine the relationship between patient engagement types and doctor service provision. A qualitative study utilizing discourse analysis of online doctor-patient communication was conducted. A total of 300 consultation records from the Chinese OHC, Ding Xiang Doctor (DXY), were collected between August 1 and October 31, 2023.

Results

The study identifies four patient engagement types, including emotional disclosure, decision-making engagement, consumption-oriented, and doctor-driven types. Discourse analysis reveals that doctors adjust their communication strategies according to patient engagement types, prioritizing service provision and communication tasks differently. Specifically, doctors turn to 1) respond with more empathy to emotional disclosure patients, providing more comforting words; 2) discuss more with decision-making engagement patients on treatment plan and provide more medical explanations; 3) focus more on information provision by answering patient inquiries with less interaction with consumption-oriented patients; and 4) demonstrate more authority with higher frequency of use of closed questions, outlining possible conditions and providing concise diagnostic advice with doctor-driven patients.

Conclusions

This study explores the impact of patient engagement in OHCs on doctor service provision. It reveals that doctors adapt their communication approaches based on the patient engagement types.

Practice implications

The results indicate that doctors adjust their service provision based on patient engagement online, emphasizing the importance role of patients in self-report health conditions and concerns. Patients are encouraged to adopt proactive engagement to facilitate the effective online doctor- patient communication, and ultimately improve the quality of online health consultations. In addition, the doctors are expected to be more patient in OHCs compared to offline, and help patients to align their online engagement types accordingly.

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来源期刊

Patient Education and Counseling 医学-公共卫生、环境卫生与职业卫生

CiteScore

5.60

自引率

11.40%

发文量

384

审稿时长

46 days

期刊介绍： Patient Education and Counseling is an interdisciplinary, international journal for patient education and health promotion researchers, managers and clinicians. The journal seeks to explore and elucidate the educational, counseling and communication models in health care. Its aim is to provide a forum for fundamental as well as applied research, and to promote the study of organizational issues involved with the delivery of patient education, counseling, health promotion services and training models in improving communication between providers and patients.