Perceptions of good physicians in patients’ online consultations: Evidence from a Chinese platform

This article aimed to offer insights into patients’ expectations regarding the traits of physicians, with the goal of helping physicians gain a better understanding of patient needs and provide better care. This study used a Python crawler script to collect patients’ comments from haodf.com, a major online consultation platform in China, to examine the expected character traits of physicians by patients. A total of 83,315 comments were obtained. We selected positive comments from patients, performed text segmentation using Jieba, and utilized the TextRank algorithm to identify high-ranking words based on the Index of Relative Importance (IRI) within these comments. To make the findings comprehensible and practical for physicians and medical educators, we utilized a word cloud to visualize the results. We classified the high-ranking words into four dimensions—professional competence, communication attitude, communication ability, and character traits—based on the categorization of positive physician qualities found in relevant literature. Key findings from the study included: (1) The top 23 high ranking words for traits of good physicians (in descending order) were: patient, meticulous, proficient, precise, kind, moderate, successful, gentle, rigorous, explicit, clear, effective, humorous, sincere, skilled, kindhearted, modest, awesome, practical (and not flashy), unhurried, experienced, clean, and excellent; (2) Patients placed the highest value on the professional competence of physicians, followed by their communication attitude, communication ability, and character traits; (3) Despite the highest IRI score for professional competence, it was exceeded by the combined scores of communication attitude and communication ability. This underscored the significance of effective communication in medical encounters. Drawing from these findings, recommendations are proposed for physicians and medical educators to enhance the quality of medical encounters. These suggestions include implementing Narrative Medicine training to improve communication awareness and skills as well as encouraging lifelong continuing medical education to maintain professional competence among practitioners. This study contributes to the establishment of positive physician-patient relationships in both telemedicine and face-to-face medical interactions.