Information Gap in Physician Review Websites: A Comparative Study of Patient Expectations and Available Information

Abstract

Physician Review Websites (PRWs) help users select physicians by providing both structured and unstructured data on physicians and patients’ experiences with the physicians. In this paper, we study PRWs as an information system and investigate the adequacy of the available information. We first conduct an empirical study to understand the information that patients seek from PRWs through a survey instrument administered on 243 patients. We then use a topic modeling approach on approximately 81,000 text reviews of patients (unstructured data) to discover the information that is actually available on the PRWs. We then combine the findings from both the approaches and find that 9 out of the top 15 areas patients consider important are unavailable or partially available on PRWs, thus highlighting an information gap. Our work will help PRWs and physicians/hospitals restructure information on their websites and devise strategies to nudge patients to write reviews highlighting the desired information.