Influence Of Patients’ Language Signals On Doctors’ Social Support During Online Health Consultation

In the past two years,China’s Internet hospital construction has shown a blowout growth,forming a medical force that cannot be underestimated.At the same time,the scale of users using online medical communities has continued to expand.Among online health platforms,the rate of online consultation and follow-up consultation is 74.0%.%.During online consultation,patients log in to the platform,send consultation requests,and communicate with doctors online to seek support.However,due to the lack of face-to-face communication,the problem of information asymmetry between TCM and patients in online health consultation still exists or is even more serious.,resulting in low efficiency of doctor-patient communication,and doctors unable to provide corresponding support,which greatly affects the quality of doctor-patient online communication and patient satisfaction.Considering that online health consultation,as a service model,is essentially a process of value co-creation between doctors and patients,doctors need the active participation of patients to provide better social support.Patients need to provide accurate and comprehensive medical information as much as possible for doctors to better carry out medical services,and doctors also need to deeply understand the needs of patients and give them corresponding social support.However,previous studies have mostly focused on the relevant behavior and information of doctors.Therefore,this paper starts from the perspective of patients,considering that in online consultation,the text information sent by patients is the core content of doctor-patient interaction,and may be in a large amount of unstructured information.There are factors that affect physicians’ social support that previous studies have overlooked.Therefore,this paper focuses on studying the influence of patients’ language signals in the text on the social support of doctors,so as to provide suggestions for improving the quality and efficiency of consultation.Based on this,this paper takes "Good Doctor Online" as the research platform and the text information in the process of doctor-patient consultation as the research object to study the process of doctor-patient interaction.Firstly,based on Signaling Theory and Social Support Theory,the language signals in patient texts are divided into two types:informational signals and emotional signals,and the social support of doctors is divided into informational support and emotional support.Two dimensions are supported to explore the influence mechanism of signals on doctors’ social support during online consultation.Second,make assumptions.Three indicators of text readability,text richness and text professionalism are selected for information signals,and three indicators of negative emotional tendency,initial trust and tone intensity are selected for emotional signals.In data analysis,Python program is used to crawl the content of doctor-patient conversations,word segmentation software such as jieba and statistical tools are used to extract text information,and tools such as SnowNLP are used to perform sentiment analysis,etc.,to complete the aggregation and integration of data,and then use Eviews and Stata software was used to verify the model.Through verification and analysis,this paper draws the following conclusions:（1）In the information signal of patients,text richness and professionalism have a positive impact on the provision of information support for doctors,while the readability of text has no significant effect on the provision of information support for doctors.（2）The influence of the patient’s information signal on the doctor’s emotional support is the same as that of the information support.This shows that the richness and professionalism of the text can not only help doctors understand the information they need,but also arouse doctors’ perception of patients’ conditions,which has a positive impact on doctors’ emotional support.（3）In the emotional signals of patients,the more positive their emotional tendencies are,the more they can promote doctors to provide more information support,but the provision of emotional support for doctors is not significant.In further analysis,we found that the positive tendency of diabetic patients can evoke the information support of doctors more,while the negative emotional tendency of lung cancer patients can evoke the information support of doctors more.In the impact on emotional support,the negative emotional tendencies of diabetic patients can significantly promote the provision of emotional support by doctors,while the relatively positive emotions of patients with lung cancer will make doctors provide more emotional support.（4）In the emotional signals of patients,the establishment of the initial trust relationship and the tone intensity have a significant positive impact on the provision of information support and emotional support by doctors.In addition,we also observed that compared with common chronic diseases,if patients with more complex diseases such as lung cancer can improve their health management level,they will use more medical terms or professional expressions during the consultation process,and they will be more likely to It can help doctors diagnose the condition and prompt them to provide more information support.In conclusion,this study provides a theoretical basis for promoting the development of online health communities and improving the quality and efficiency of doctor-patient communication.In practice,we also suggest that patients can also express their own situation from the two dimensions of information and emotion during consultation to obtain effective medical services.At the same time,this paper also puts forward relevant suggestions for the improvement of online health community.