Identifying healthcare needs with patient experience reviews using ChatGPT

Background Valuable findings can be obtained through data mining in patients’ online reviews. Also identifying healthcare needs from the patient’s perspective can more accurately improve the quality of care and the experience of the visit. Thereby avoiding unnecessary waste of health care resources. The large language model (LLM) can be a promising tool due to research that demonstrates its outstanding performance and potential in directions such as data mining, healthcare management, and more. Objective We aim to propose a methodology to address this problem, specifically, the recent breakthrough of LLM can be leveraged for effectively understanding healthcare needs from patient experience reviews. Methods We used 504,198 reviews collected from a large online medical platform, haodf.com. We used the reviews to create Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) templates, which categorized patient reviews into three categories, reflecting the areas of concern of patients. With the introduction of thought chains, we embedded ABSA templates into the prompts for ChatGPT, which was then used to identify patient needs. Results Our method has a weighted total precision of 0.944, which was outstanding compared to the direct narrative tasks in ChatGPT-4o, which have a weighted total precision of 0.890. Weighted total recall and F1 scores also reached 0.884 and 0.912 respectively, surpassing the 0.802 and 0.843 scores for “direct narratives in ChatGPT.” Finally, the accuracy of the three sampling methods was 91.8%, 91.7%, and 91.2%, with an average accuracy of over 91.5%. Conclusions Combining ChatGPT with ABSA templates can achieve satisfactory results in analyzing patient reviews. As our work applies to other LLMs, we shed light on understanding the demands of patients and health consumers with novel models, which can contribute to the agenda of enhancing patient experience and better healthcare resource allocations effectively.