What makes clinical documents helpful and engaging? An empirical investigation of experience sharing in an online medical community.

Background: Social media have emerged as a platform for experience and knowledge sharing in the medical community. The online medical community is garnering increasing research attention; however, there is a lack of understanding of what factors influence the helpfulness and engagement of experience sharing in the community.

Methods: Clinical documents manifest physicians' experience and knowledge. This study fills the knowledge gap by investigating what elements of clinical documents contribute to the helpfulness of sharing clinical documents online and what influence member engagement. Clinical documents follow certain architecture to specify their structure and semantics for exchange (e.g., HL7 C-CDA). Accordingly, the structural elements of clinical documents may influence document helpfulness for the online community. Member engagement is one of the indicators of community success. We collected 6514 clinical documents from a real-world online medical community, and normalized them with the structural elements of HL7 C-CDA. We performed regression analyses to identify the structural elements that have significant impacts on document helpfulness and member engagement.

Results: The results show that some structural elements of clinical documents such as assessment, chief complaints, medications, physical exams, procedures, results, and vital signs sections have positive effects whereas assessment and plan, general status, history and past illness of patients, instructions, problem and review of systems have negative effects on the helpfulness of clinical documents. The results also reveal that structural elements such as family history, history of past illness, medication, physical exam, review of systems, and vital signs positively; whereas assessment, assessment and plan, instruction, and result negatively; influence member engagement.

Conclusions: The findings provide guide on how to improve the effectiveness of sharing clinical experience online. The new and in-depth insights may contribute to the success of online medical communities and the quality of medical decisions.