Abstract 1498P
Background
Confronted with a diagnosis, cancer patients and their families often engage in information seeking behaviors to understand their condition and treatment alternatives better. Online consultation platforms dedicated to providing medical advice allow users (patients and their caregivers) to freely express their needs and learn more about available treatment options. The textual analysis of the data obtained from doctor-user online communications offers unique opportunities for researchers to reveal user attitudes, concerns and informational needs that are underrepresented in traditional surveys. Such a method is non-intrusive in relation to the doctor-user communication and has high ecological validity.
Methods
This study aims to explore user needs and representations of cancer treatments (chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy) expressed within an online platform for doctor-user consultations. The inclusion criteria were user messages that involved keywords ‘chemotherapy’ (and/or ‘chemo’) and/or ‘radiotherapy’ (and/or ‘radio’) and/or ‘immunotherapy’. The corpus consisted of 6,865 messages published in 3,379 consultations. It was then analyzed using the T-LAB software for statistical analysis of textual data. Based on the cluster analysis, contents related to treatments were grouped into significant themes characterized by specific groups of words.
Results
The cluster analysis revealed the occurrence of two clusters: one ‘technical’, characterized by words related to the disease and its treatment (e.g.“diagnosis”, “tumor”, “surgery”…); the second ‘subjective’, linked to the personal experience of users (e.g. “think”, “believe”, “fear”…). Further analysis revealed the specific representations of each treatment on both technical and subjective levels.
Conclusions
The study contributes to broadening the knowledge regarding cancer patients’ and their caregivers’ representations of cancer treatments as well as their needs within the framework of medical consultations. Our results emphasize the importance of both 1) technical clarifications related to treatments provided by health care professionals and 2) personalized approach during the medical consultations.
Clinical trial identification
Editorial acknowledgement
Legal entity responsible for the study
University of Milan.
Funding
Has not received any funding.
Disclosure
All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.