Global Perception of Telemedicine before and after COVID-19: A Text Mining Analysis

Determining the perception and sentiment of public's opinion of telemedicine and telecare has benefits to healthcare organizations, physicians and patients. Determining a relationship between opinion and demographic elements will aid in developing ways to close the gap between perception and readiness to implement healthcare technology for patients. The concept of telemedicine becomes more critical due to the onset of pandemics such as COVID-19. In addition, with telemedicine being a viable option to reduce cost and inconvenience for the patient, while delivering care that is effective and efficient, having patient buy in will be a key element. This study aims to identify the perception about telemedicine and telecare based on the posts by Twitter users eighteen months before and after COVID-19 pandemic. We leveraged VADER sentiment analysis model to identify the sentiment of the public using the tweets they posted. Out of approximately 1,073,817 tweets included, 491,695 unique tweets from 10,495 unique users met the inclusion criteria Among all countries, United States dominated the tweet volume. Among all the states in US, it is interesting to note that district of Columbia dominated the tweet volume. Among tweets from top five English speaking countries, interestingly after March 2020, the average sentiment of all countries seems to converge to the same value. Results indicate that before COVID-19 outbreak, people had neutral perception or sentiment towards telemedicine, while after the onset of increased cases and high alert situations, people tend to support Telemedicine and the overall perception started to grow towards the positive side.