{"title":"Understanding Patient Satisfaction in Online Healthcare: A Study from Doctor-Patient Interaction Perspective","authors":"Yalin Su, Junli Zhang, Xiaodan Yu","doi":"10.1007/s40745-026-00688-2","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The digital transformation of healthcare has introduced online healthcare services that offer unprecedented accessibility and convenience. However, the shift to virtual doctor-patient interactions has unveiled new challenges in ensuring patient satisfaction. Prior research has primarily focused on the doctor's perspective, with scant attention given to the patient's perception of informational and emotional support within these digital interactions. Drawing the perspective from Media Synchronicity Theory, this study investigates how online healthcare interaction patterns influence patient perceived satisfaction of informational support and emotional support, and how different interaction patterns across varied media types impact these satisfaction facets. Through an empirical analysis of 7374 patient consultation records from \"www.haodf.com\", this study analyzes the influence of interaction pattern such as doctors' response time, interaction rounds, frequency and media synchronicity in patients' satisfaction. Research results indicate that while doctor's response time might not be the most decisive factor, other interactive factors— interaction rounds and consultation frequency positively influence patient satisfaction with both perceived informational support and emotional support, and media synchronicity positively moderates the impact of the number of interaction rounds on patient satisfaction with perceived informational support and emotional support. By introducing a patient-centric approach to understanding satisfaction in online healthcare interactions, this study highlights the importance of media synchronicity in optimizing communication and provides empirical evidence for the role of interaction patterns in shaping patient satisfaction. The findings offer insights for healthcare providers and platform designers to enhance online service delivery and patient engagement.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36280,"journal":{"name":"Annals of Data Science","volume":"13 2","pages":"501 - 521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2026-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Annals of Data Science","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40745-026-00688-2","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Decision Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The digital transformation of healthcare has introduced online healthcare services that offer unprecedented accessibility and convenience. However, the shift to virtual doctor-patient interactions has unveiled new challenges in ensuring patient satisfaction. Prior research has primarily focused on the doctor's perspective, with scant attention given to the patient's perception of informational and emotional support within these digital interactions. Drawing the perspective from Media Synchronicity Theory, this study investigates how online healthcare interaction patterns influence patient perceived satisfaction of informational support and emotional support, and how different interaction patterns across varied media types impact these satisfaction facets. Through an empirical analysis of 7374 patient consultation records from "www.haodf.com", this study analyzes the influence of interaction pattern such as doctors' response time, interaction rounds, frequency and media synchronicity in patients' satisfaction. Research results indicate that while doctor's response time might not be the most decisive factor, other interactive factors— interaction rounds and consultation frequency positively influence patient satisfaction with both perceived informational support and emotional support, and media synchronicity positively moderates the impact of the number of interaction rounds on patient satisfaction with perceived informational support and emotional support. By introducing a patient-centric approach to understanding satisfaction in online healthcare interactions, this study highlights the importance of media synchronicity in optimizing communication and provides empirical evidence for the role of interaction patterns in shaping patient satisfaction. The findings offer insights for healthcare providers and platform designers to enhance online service delivery and patient engagement.
期刊介绍：
Annals of Data Science (ADS) publishes cutting-edge research findings, experimental results and case studies of data science. Although Data Science is regarded as an interdisciplinary field of using mathematics, statistics, databases, data mining, high-performance computing, knowledge management and virtualization to discover knowledge from Big Data, it should have its own scientific contents, such as axioms, laws and rules, which are fundamentally important for experts in different fields to explore their own interests from Big Data. ADS encourages contributors to address such challenging problems at this exchange platform. At present, how to discover knowledge from heterogeneous data under Big Data environment needs to be addressed. ADS is a series of volumes edited by either the editorial office or guest editors. Guest editors will be responsible for call-for-papers and the review process for high-quality contributions in their volumes.
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