Characteristics of Online Health Care Services From China’s Largest Online Medical Platform: Cross-sectional Survey Study

作者：Xuehan Jiang, Hong Xie, Rui Tang, Yanmei Du, Tao Li, Jinsheng Gao, XU Xiu-ping, Siqi Jiang, Tingting Zhao, Wei Zhao, Xingzhi Sun, Gang Hu, Dejun Wu, Guotong Xie · 发表于：Journal of Medical Internet Research · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.2196/25817 · 被引用次数：104 · 研究领域：Mobile Health and mHealth Applications、Health Literacy and Information Accessibility、Telemedicine and Telehealth Implementation

BACKGROUND: Internet hospitals in China are in great demand due to limited and unevenly distributed health care resources, lack of family doctors, increased burdens of chronic diseases, and rapid growth of the aged population. The COVID-19 epidemic catalyzed the expansion of online health care services. In recent years, internet hospitals have been rapidly developed. Ping An Good Doctor is the largest, national online medical entry point in China and is a widely used platform providing online health care services. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to give a comprehensive description of the characteristics of the online consultations and inquisitions in Ping An Good Doctor. The analyses tried to answer the following questions: (1) What are the characteristics of the consultations in Ping An Good Doctor in terms of department and disease profiles? (2) Who uses the online health services most frequently? and (3) How is the user experience of the online consultations of Ping An Good Doctor? METHODS: A total of 35.3 million consultations and inquisitions over the course of 1 year were analyzed with respect to the distributions of departments and diseases, user profiles, and consulting behaviors. RESULTS: The geographical distribution of the usage of Ping An Good Doctor showed that Shandong (18.4%), Yunnan (15.6%), Shaanxi (7.2%), and Guangdong (5.5%) were the provinces that used it the most; they accounted for 46.6% of the total consultations and inquisitions. In terms of department dist...