Search Results (10)

Background: Dermatology in healthcare is changed by technological advancements, patient awareness, and developing healthcare needs. In Saudi Arabia, choosing a dermatologist is influenced by various factors, including patient satisfaction, digital technology use, and the physician’s characteristics and qualities. Purpose: The major aim of this research was to evaluate factors influencing patients’ choice of dermatologists in Saudi Arabia, including past experiences, reputation, social media influence, and access to care. Methods: A comprehensive national survey was conducted in Saudi Arabia. The research included 1038 participants using stratified sampling, predominantly from the 18–25 age group (67.1%). The distribution covered all regions of Saudi Arabia, with a larger portion from the Central and Western regions. The survey included quantitative and qualitative questions, assessing factors such as previous experiences with dermatologists, the importance of physician reputation, the role of digital platforms, and access to care. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Studies (SPSS 22; IBM Corp., New York, NY, USA), with continuous variables expressed as mean ± standard deviation and categorical variables as percentages. Results: Our study highlighted a strong preference for dermatologists based on previous positive experiences (95.3%) and reputable dermatologists (95.2%). Factors like social media presence were less influential. Demographics matter, with younger and female participants favoring female doctors. The education level affects preference factors like ads, and the convenience of their location holds minimal sway. Recommendations from peers and healthcare professionals carry significant weight in the decision. Conclusions: Positive patient experiences and professional reputation suggest that these are the factors that affect patients’ selection of a dermatologist the most. The research findings indicated that while digital platforms are important for information dissemination, they play a minimal role in the actual selection process. The findings can guide dermatologists and healthcare policymakers in enhancing patient-centered care and adapting to evolving patient preferences in the digital age. Full article

Background/Objectives: This study explores the multifaceted factors influencing public trust in healthcare services provided by doctors in public hospitals in Pakistan. The objective is to examine the relationships between various determinants such as doctors’ reputation and expertise, patient participation in decision-making, communication clarity, health literacy levels, and trust in prescribed medications to provide actionable insights for improving healthcare trust. Methods: A total of 550 patients from public hospitals were surveyed, and data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). This approach enabled the identification of intricate relationships between the key factors influencing trust in healthcare services. Results: The findings indicate that patient participation in decision-making and transparent communication significantly enhance trust in prescribed medications. Additionally, health literacy emerged as a crucial factor, with higher levels of understanding leading to greater confidence in healthcare services. Conclusions: The study highlights the importance of patient-centered care, clear communication strategies, and health literacy initiatives in strengthening public trust in healthcare systems. Practical recommendations are provided for policymakers, healthcare professionals, and researchers to collaboratively improve healthcare service delivery and foster public confidence. Full article

Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) can present several biomechanical alterations, such as tremors, rigidity, bradykinesia, postural instability, and gait alterations. The Movement Disorder Society–Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) has a good reputation for uniformly evaluating motor and non-motor aspects of PD. However, motor clinical assessment depends on visual observations, which are mostly qualitative, with subtle differences not recognized. Many works have examined evaluations and analyses of these biomechanical alterations. However, there are no reviews on this topic. This paper presents a scoping review of computer models based on expert knowledge and machine learning (ML). The eligibility criteria and sources of evidence are represented by papers in journals indexed in the Journal Citation Report (JCR), and this paper analyzes the data, methods, results, and application opportunities in clinical environments or as support for new research. Finally, we analyze the results’ explainability and the acceptance of such systems as tools to help physicians, both now and in future contributions. Many researchers have addressed PD biomechanics by using explainable artificial intelligence or combining several analysis models to provide explainable and transparent results, considering possible biases and precision and creating trust and security when using the models. Full article

In an era of growing competition in the healthcare market, adopting a patient-centered approach is mandatory for the survival and growth of any public or private hospital. This requires a better understanding of patients’ behavior and an increased focus on satisfying their needs and expectations. This paper was developed in this context and aims to study the main drivers of patients’ behavioral intentions. A conceptual model was proposed, highlighting the linkages between service quality, doctors’ reputation, patients’ trust, service value, and patients’ behavioral intentions. To examine the different research hypotheses, a quantitative study including 242 patients was conducted in Saudi Arabia using the convenience sampling method. The smart PLS approach was used to test the measurement and structural models. The findings indicated that trust and service value positively affected patients’ behavioral intentions. Trust in the healthcare provider was positively affected by two dimensions of service quality: healthcare provider concern and physician concern. Trust in doctors was found to be positively related to the reputation of the doctor. Service value was positively influenced by the convenience of the healthcare process, healthcare provider concerns, and doctors’ reputations. This study is original because it is among the few studies that investigate patients’ behavioral intentions toward healthcare services in a developing country (Saudi Arabia). Furthermore, it is among the rare studies to examine the role of doctors’ reputations in service values. The findings would offer meaningful implications for practitioners in the healthcare market for maintaining relationships with their patients. Full article

Background: Little research has studied the peer effect of physicians and patients in online health communities (OHCs) simultaneously. The study investigates the impact of the focal physician’s peers (F-peers) on the focal physician (F-physician), and the impact of patients of the focal physician’s peers (F-P-patients) on the focal physician’s patients (F-patients). Moreover, based on brand extension and accessible–diagnosable theories, this study explores the moderating effects of the intensity of F-peers’ knowledge sharing behavior and department reputation. Methods: This study collects data of 3297 physicians and related patients from Haodf.com platform between January 2019 and December 2019. Both two-way fixed effect and panel negative binomial regression are adopted to quantify the effects. Results: Results show that the behavior of F-peers positively affects the behavior of the F-physician, while the behavior of F-P-patients positively affects the behavior of F-patients. Moreover, both the intensity of F-peers’ knowledge sharing behavior and department reputation have a compound moderating effect. Conclusions: This study contributes to the literature of peer effects by constructing the conceptual framework of different types of individual participation behaviors in OHCs. The findings offer practical guides for establishing an incentive mechanism and formulating peer incentives or competition strategies in OHCs. Full article

(1) Background: The appearance of physician rating websites (PRWs) has raised researchers’ interest in the online healthcare field, particularly how users consume information available on PRWs in terms of online physician reviews and providers’ information in their decision-making process. The aim of this study is to consistently review the early scientific literature related to digital healthcare platforms, summarize key findings and study features, identify literature deficiencies, and suggest digital solutions for future research. (2) Methods: A systematic literature review using key databases was conducted to search published articles between 2010 and 2020 and identified 52 papers that focused on PRWs, different signals in the form of PRWs’ features, the findings of these studies, and peer-reviewed articles. The research features and main findings are reported in tables and figures. (3) Results: The review of 52 papers identified 22 articles for online reputation, 15 for service popularity, 16 for linguistic features, 15 for doctor–patient concordance, 7 for offline reputation, and 11 for trustworthiness signals. Out of 52 studies, 75% used quantitative techniques, 12% employed qualitative techniques, and 13% were mixed-methods investigations. The majority of studies retrieved larger datasets using machine learning techniques (44/52). These studies were mostly conducted in China (38), the United States (9), and Europe (3). The majority of signals were positively related to the clinical outcomes. Few studies used conventional surveys of patient treatment experience (5, 9.61%), and few used panel data (9, 17%). These studies found a high degree of correlation between these signals with clinical outcomes. (4) Conclusions: PRWs contain valuable signals that provide insights into the service quality and patient treatment choice, yet it has not been extensively used for evaluating the quality of care. This study offers implications for researchers to consider digital solutions such as advanced machine learning and data mining techniques to test hypotheses regarding a variety of signals on PRWs for clinical decision-making. Full article

(1) Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically and rapidly changed the overall picture of healthcare in the way how doctors care for their patients. Due to the significant strain on hospitals and medical facilities, the popularity of web-based medical consultation has drawn the focus of researchers during the deadly coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the United States. Healthcare organizations are now reacting to COVID-19 by rapidly adopting new tools and innovations such as e-consultation platforms, which refer to the delivery of healthcare services digitally or remotely using digital technology to treat patients. However, patients’ utilization of different signal transmission mechanisms to seek medical advice through e-consultation websites has not been discussed during the pandemic. This paper examines the impact of different online signals (online reputation and online effort), offline signals (offline reputation) and disease risk on patients’ physician selection choice for e-consultation during the COVID-19 crisis. (2) Methods: Drawing on signaling theory, a theoretical model was developed to explore the antecedents of patients’ e-consultation choice toward a specific physician. The model was tested using 3-times panel data sets, covering 4231 physicians on Healthgrades and Vitals websites during the pandemic months of January, March and May 2020. (3) Results: The findings suggested that online reputation, online effort and disease risk were positively related to patients’ online physician selection. The disease risk has also affected patients’ e-consultation choice. A high-risk disease positively moderates the relationship between online reputation and patients’ e-consultation choice, which means market signals (online reputation) are more influential than seller signals (offline reputation and online effort). Hence, market signals strengthened the effect in the case of high-risk disease. (4) Conclusions: The findings of this study provide practical suggestions for physicians, platform developers and policymakers in online environments to improve their service quality during the crisis. This article offers a practical guide on using emerging technology to provide virtual care during the pandemic. This study also provides implications for government officials and doctors on the potentials of consolidating virtual care solutions in the near future in order to contribute to the integration of emerging technology into healthcare. Full article

Online medical team is an emerging online medical model in which patients can choose a doctor to register and consult. A doctor’s reputation cannot be ignored. It is worth studying how that online reputation affects the focal doctor’s appointment numbers on the online medical team. Based on the online reputation mechanism and social interdependence theory, this study empirically studied the impact of the focal doctor’s own reputation and other teammates’ reputation on his/her appointment numbers. Our data include 31,143 doctors from 6103 online expert teams of Guahao.com. The results indicate that for a leader doctor, his/her appointment numbers are not related to his/her own reputation, and there was an inverted U-shaped relationship with the ordinary doctors’ reputations on the team. For an ordinary doctor, his/her appointment numbers were positively correlated with his/her own reputation and positively correlated with his/her leader’s reputation and there was an inverted U-shaped relationship with the other ordinary doctors’ reputations. The research showed that there is a positive spillover effect on the team leader’s reputation. There are two relationships between team doctors: competition and cooperation. This study provides guidance for the leader to select team members and the ordinary doctor to select a team. Full article

This study examines job satisfaction of physicians in Korea and investigates factors affecting their satisfaction. The majority of the past studies tend to cover few minor factors— including stress and occupation professionality or insufficient scale of respondents in particular regions—thus leading to restricted explanations on job satisfaction of the overall physician pool in Korea. This study examines the level of job satisfaction of physicians in Korea and factors affecting their satisfaction by using the ‘2016 Korean Physician Survey (KPS)’ data which included all physicians in Korea. Ordinal logistic regression analysis was conducted in this study in order to identify the factors affecting job satisfaction of physicians in terms of care environment attributes. These attributes included autonomy for care delivery, colleagues/staff/patient relations, income, healthcare resources, social reputation, personal leisure time, administration, restrictions and regulations, and work hours and loads. For the ordinal logistic regression analysis, general socio-demographic attributes, such as gender, age, specialty, job position, type of affiliated healthcare organization, working region, and length of service were controlled beforehand. The result of our measures, the affecting factors of job satisfaction for physicians, include being able to; maintain positive relations with patients through adequate time for consultation and necessary healthcare, have the autonomy to make clinical decisions, have healthy relations with peers and staff, obtain respect from family and society, work in an environment with desirable income and have adequate health resources, and have appropriate work hours and loads for those who facilitate high-quality care. Creating an environment in which physicians can focus on patient-oriented healthcare will contribute to promoting national healthcare. Full article

Objectives: To evaluate the perceptions and extent of practicing self-medication among undergraduate pharmacy students. Methods: This cross-sectional, questionnaire-based study was conducted over a six month period (January to June 2016) among undergraduate pharmacy students in five reputable public universities of Bangladesh. It involved face-to-face interviews regarding self-medication of 250 respondents selected by simple random sampling. Results: Self-medication was reported by 88.0% of students. Antipyretics (58.40%) were mostly preferred for the treatment of fever and headaches. The major cause for self-medication was minor illness (59.60%, p = 0.73) while previous prescriptions were the main source of knowledge as well as the major factor (52.80%, p = 0.94) dominating the self-medication practice. The results also demonstrated 88.80% of students had previous knowledge on self-medication and 83.60% of students always checked the information on the label; mainly the expiry date before use (85.60%). A significant (p < 0.05) portion of the students (51% male and 43% female) perceived it was an acceptable practice as they considered self-medication to be a segment of self-care. Furthermore, students demonstrated differences in their response level towards the adverse effect of drugs, the health hazard by a higher dose of drug, a physician’s help in case of side effects, taking medicine without proper knowledge, and stopping selling medicine without prescription. Conclusions: Self-medication was commonly used among pharmacy students primarily for minor illnesses using over-the-counter medications. Although it is an inevitable practice for them it should be considered an important public health problem as this practice may increase the misuse or irrational use of medicines. Full article