Champagne-Langabeer Tiffany, Swank Michael W, Manas Shruthi, Si Yuqi, Roberts Kirk
School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center, 7000 Fannin Suite 600, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Healthcare (Basel). 2021 May 27;9(6):634. doi: 10.3390/healthcare9060634.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a large expansion of telehealth, but little is known about user sentiment. Tweets containing the terms "telehealth" and "telemedicine" were extracted (n = 192,430) from the official Twitter API between November 2019 and April 2020. A random subset of 2000 tweets was annotated by trained readers to classify tweets according to their content, including telehealth, sentiment, user type, and relation to COVID-19. A state-of-the-art NLP model (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, ) was used to categorize the remaining tweets. Following a low and fairly stable level of activity, telehealth tweets rose dramatically beginning the first week of March 2020. The sentiment was overwhelmingly positive or neutral, with only a small percentage of negative tweets. Users included patients, clinicians, vendors (entities that promote the use of telehealth technology or services), and others, which represented the largest category. No significant differences were seen in sentiment across user groups. The COVID-19 pandemic produced a large increase in user tweets related to telehealth and COVID-19, and user sentiment suggests that most people feel positive or neutral about telehealth.
新冠疫情导致远程医疗大幅扩张，但用户情绪方面却知之甚少。2019年11月至2020年4月期间，从官方推特应用程序编程接口中提取了包含“远程医疗”和“远程医学”术语的推文（n = 192,430条）。由训练有素的读者对随机抽取的2000条推文进行注释，以便根据推文内容进行分类，包括远程医疗、情绪、用户类型以及与新冠疫情的关系。使用最先进的自然语言处理模型（来自变换器的双向编码器表示）对其余推文进行分类。在经历了较低且相当稳定的活跃度之后，远程医疗推文自2020年3月的第一周开始急剧增加。情绪绝大多数为积极或中性，只有一小部分负面推文。用户包括患者、临床医生、供应商（推广远程医疗技术或服务使用的实体）以及其他群体，其中其他群体占比最大。不同用户群体在情绪方面未观察到显著差异。新冠疫情导致与远程医疗和新冠疫情相关的用户推文大幅增加，而且用户情绪表明大多数人对远程医疗持积极或中性态度。
