ABSTRACT
As an emerging form of health care with accelerated growth in recent years, online medical consultation (OMC) has received extensive attention worldwide. Although the number of studies on OMC has increased substantially, few provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of OMC's research constituents, themes, and trends. This study, therefore, extracted 1,801 OMC-related articles published in English from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database during the past 30 years and employed a bibliometric analysis of WoS and CiteSpace to examine major constituents' distribution, collaboration relationships, themes, and trends. The results indicate that the United States, England, and China contributed the most to the proliferation of OMC studies. The United States had the greatest academic influence and the most collaborative connections, while China demonstrated the sharpest increase and most active development in recent years. However, there is a lack of substantial and close collaboration between researchers worldwide. The main themes of OMC research were Internet hospitals, COVID-19, mixed methods, online health community, and information technology. Researchers have recently shifted their attention to social media, management, efficacy, word of mouth, mental health, and anxiety. This review paper provides researchers and practitioners with a holistic and clear understanding of the features and trends of OMC research. It also identifies potential areas for future OMC research and sheds light on OMC practices.
ABSTRACT
Communication is critical in a new health emergency because it motivates the public to take preventive actions. Prior research has shown that strategies including source credibility, information transparency and uncertainty reduction actions could enhance trust in health communication on social media. Yet research on how the government in China used these trust-building strategies to engage the public during the outbreak of COVID-19 is limited. Therefore, our exploratory study developed an integrated framework for conducting quantitative content analysis to examine how the most popular government-owned newspaper in China, People's Daily, utilized a major social media platform, to engage the public. Our findings showed that accessibility to external links, provision of emotional support, and information on skills and resources were associated with increased public engagement with government COVID-19 posts. Insights gained can enable public health organizations and governments to focus on specific strategies to enhance public engagement.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has posed an unprecedented challenge to governments worldwide. Effective government communication of COVID-19 information with the public is of crucial importance. OBJECTIVE: We investigate how the most-read state-owned newspaper in China, People's Daily, used an online social networking site, Sina Weibo, to communicate about COVID-19 and whether this could engage the public. The objective of this study is to develop an integrated framework to examine the content, message style, and interactive features of COVID-19-related posts and determine their effects on public engagement in the largest social media network in China. METHODS: Content analysis was employed to scrutinize 608 COVID-19 posts, and coding was performed on three main dimensions: content, message style, and interactive features. The content dimension was coded into six subdimensions: action, new evidence, reassurance, disease prevention, health care services, and uncertainty, and the style dimension was coded into the subdimensions of narrative and nonnarrative. As for interactive features, they were coded into links to external sources, use of hashtags, use of questions to solicit feedback, and use of multimedia. Public engagement was measured in the form of the number of shares, comments, and likes on the People's Daily's Sina Weibo account from January 20, 2020, to March 11, 2020, to reveal the association between different levels of public engagement and communication strategies. A one-way analysis of variance followed by a post-hoc Tukey test and negative binomial regression analysis were employed to generate the results. RESULTS: We found that although the content frames of action, new evidence, and reassurance delivered in a nonnarrative style were predominant in COVID-19 communication by the government, posts related to new evidence and a nonnarrative style were strong negative predictors of the number of shares. In terms of generating a high number of shares, it was found that disease prevention posts delivered in a narrative style were able to achieve this purpose. Additionally, an interaction effect was found between content and style. The use of a narrative style in disease prevention posts had a significant positive effect on generating comments and likes by the Chinese public, while links to external sources fostered sharing. CONCLUSIONS: These results have implications for governments, health organizations, medical professionals, the media, and researchers on their epidemic communication to engage the public. Selecting suitable communication strategies may foster active liking and sharing of posts on social media, which in turn, might raise the public's awareness of COVID-19 and motivate them to take preventive measures. The sharing of COVID-19 posts is particularly important because this action can reach out to a large audience, potentially helping to contain the spread of the virus.