User Perception towards Telemedicine Before and During COVID-19

Abstract

Telemedicine provides various conveniences and solutions to several problems related to health services. The number of downloads of telemedicine apps has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the continuance mainly depends on user satisfaction associated with user perception of service quality. This study aims to figure out whether there are any changes in user perception toward telemedicine before and during the pandemic. This study proposes an approach that utilizes customer reviews of Halodoc and Alodokter from the Google Play Store. User perception extracted from user reviews includes sentiment polarity and the most discussed topics of telemedicine apps. Further analysis was conducted by mapping the most discussed topics to dimensions of service quality. The results show that the percentage of reviews with negative sentiment during the pandemic increased compared to before the pandemic. The highest percentage of topics discussed in negative nuance during pandemic is about system quality, which are payment methods, unauthorized deduction of user balances, and suspected leaks of users' private data. The findings of this research contribute to the preliminary information related to the sustainability of telemedicine usage. This research also extends the literature on the potential use of textual reviews in user perception on health platforms.