Patients' satisfaction factors mining and sentiment analysis of B2C mail-order pharmacy reviews

BackgroundIn recent years, mail-order pharmacies have been accepted by increasingly more patients, and the prospects for mail-order pharmacies are optimistic. This article explores the patients’ satisfaction factors addressed in Business to Customer (B2C) mail-order pharmacy reviews and analyzes the sentiments expressed in the reviews. The goal of this work is to help B2C mail-order pharmacy enterprises identify patients’ concerns, continuously improve the health services level.MethodsThis paper was based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. From a B2C mail-order pharmacy of integrated e-commerce and a vertical B2C mail-order pharmacy (JD.COM and J1.COM, respectively), 136,630 pieces of over-the-counter (OTC) drug review data posted from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2018 were selected as samples and used to explore the satisfaction factors of B2C mail-order pharmacy patients regarding the entire drug purchasing process. Then, the sentiments expressed in the drug reviews were analyzed with SnowNLP.ResultCategorization of the 12 factors identified by LDA showed that 5 factors were related to logistics; these 5 factors, which also included the most drug reviews, made up 38.5% of the reviews. The number of factors related to drug prices was second, with 3 factors, and reviews of drug prices made up 25.5% of the reviews. Customer service and drug effects each had two related factors, and a smaller percentage of these reviews (13.95%) were related to drug effects. Patients still maintain positive opinions of JD.COM and J1.COM. However, some opinions on logistics and drug prices are expressed.Conclusion The most important task for mail-order pharmacies is to improve logistics. It is better to develop self-built logistics. Both types of B2C mail-order pharmacies can improve patient viscosity by implementing marketing strategies. With regard to customer service, focusing on improving employees' service attitudes is necessary.