What Language Is Expected by Patients?The Effects of Physicians'Interaction Language on Patients on Online Health Platforms
On online health platforms,physicians provide guidance for patients using written language,and it is unlikely that all guidance will be fully accepted by patients with diverse diseases.Based on the language expectancy theory,this paper identifies the medical professional language and interpersonal language of physicians under the online physician-patient interaction context and explores their effects on patients'satisfaction perception and reward behavior,as well as the moderating role of patients'disease severity.Approximately 52 000 physician-patient interactions are collected from a leading health platform in China and processed by the text-mining,machine learning,and other methods.The empirical results indicate that the professional language of physicians has a positive effect on both the satisfaction perception and reward behavior of patients,while interpersonal language has a negative impact.Patients'disease severity positively moderates the effects of the medical professional language,but it negatively moderates the effects of the interpersonal language.These findings provide guidance for physicians on how to effectively use written language in interactions to meet the expectations of patients with varying disease severities.
online health platformsphysician-patient interactionphysician languagepatient expectationmachine learning
国家科技期刊平台
NSTL
万方数据
