The use of telemedicine and mHealth has increased rapidly in the People’s Republic of China. While telemedicine and mHealth have great potential, wide adoption of this technology depends on how patients, health care providers, and other stakeholders in the Chinese health sector perceive and accept the technology.

Objective

To explore this issue, we aimed to examine a social media platform with a dedicated focus on health information technology and informatics in China. Our goal is to utilize the findings to support further research.

In this exploratory study, we selected a social media platform—HC3i.cn—to examine the perception of telemedicine and mHealth in China. We performed keyword analysis and analyzed the prevalence and term frequency–inverse document frequency of keywords in the selected social media platform; furthermore, we performed qualitative analysis.

Telemedicine and mHealth in China

First, we provide the definitions of two key terms in this paper. Telemedicine can be defined as provision of medical services from one site to another using electronic communication devices [3,4]. This technology has been developed for several decades. In China, telemedicine was used as early as in the mid-1980s . when Chinese physicians consulted patients via telegram; “mHealth” expands telemedicine. It can be defined as “medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants, and other wireless devices” . mHealth devices expand telemedicine because they enable patients to receive care from health providers without using a desktop computer at a physically fixed location .

China’s telecommunication infrastructure is quite mature; thus, it can support the delivery of telemedicine and mHealth services for health providers . Several large telecommunication networks have been actively involved in providing telemedicine services, including International MedioNet of China and the Golden Health Network .

Regarding health service provision, there are significant disparities between rural and urban China . Young, highly qualified physicians prefer staying in urban communities .To reduce disparities in health services, Chinese government agencies and hospitals are eager to utilize telemedicine and mHealth technology .These organizations also believe that elderly patients can benefit from telemedicine and mHealth in various ways .Nonetheless, many Chinese patients and physicians are still skeptical about the new technology .Moreover, for hospitals and clinics, installation and maintenance costs are associated with the provision of telemedicine and mHealth services

Conclusions

We identified interesting issues in this paper by studying a social media platform in China. Among other things, participants in the selected platform raised concerns about quality and costs associated with the provision of telemedicine and mHealth, despite the new technology’s great potential to address different issues in the Chinese health sector. The methods applied in this paper have some limitations, and the findings may not be generalizable. We have discussed directions for further research.

Some researchers have pointed out that robots (“bots”) can generate social media content. There are specific algorithms to detect bot activities .Nonetheless, data limitations disallow us to utilize these algorithms. Importantly, bot activities normally do not change the nature of the interactions. They might increase or decrease the magnitude of regular human users’ activities to a certain extent. A full investigation of bot activities in the social media forum under our research will be the subject of a subsequent publication.

Examining social media data is a relatively new methodology in the growing field of health analytics . In this paper, we have identified a number of interesting issues from a social media platform on telemedicine, mHealth, and related technology. Several observations are worthy of further investigation: first, many participants of the selected social media platform still saw telemedicine as something used primarily within hospitals . Although some participants mentioned that patients could receive consultation at home by physicians from afar, this did not represent the general view of forum participants. Therefore, developers need to increase the technical soundness of new devices to convince patients and physicians that telemedicine and mHealth can be used “outside” hospitals and that new devices can really deliver the same level of high-quality health care as face-to-face consultations. In future research, it will be useful to compare China with other developed and less developed countries.

As our findings show, there was a strong concern with respect to interoperability among new telemedicine, mHealth, and existing technology. Understandably, health providers did not want to “start everything anew.” Forum participants often linked telemedicine and mHealth to familiar and established technology firms, such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Further research can examine whether these firms have a significant market advantage over smaller companies when promoting telemedicine and mHealth products in China . If that were the case, smaller companies, hospitals, and clinics may need to incur significant costs to develop telemedicine and mHealth before they can realize cost savings for patients in the current Chinese market .

Source:PubMed