Document is current

Article History

Received: 20 April 2024

Accepted: 2 April 2025

First Online: 17 April 2025

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: As the dataset consists of crawled data from real physician-patient online consultations that occurred independently of this research, it is classified as a public domain dataset and is therefore exempt from institutional review board approval under Article 27 of the Data Security Law of the People’s Republic of China, which applies to publicly available social media data. The same exemption applies to data crawled from social media platforms such as Weibo, as well as publicly accessible epidemic and flood-related datasets. The data collection process adhered to ethical and technical standards. The automatic web crawler strictly followed the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a widely recognized guideline in the internet domain. In accordance with China’s Data Security Management Measures, we also restricted the number of concurrent requests to any single web source to prevent excessive server load. Furthermore, in compliance with the privacy policy of the target OHC platform, only publicly available physician information was collected, and all data were anonymized to protect individual privacy. Following data processing, we submitted an ethics review application to the Institutional Review Board of the School of Business and Management at Shanghai International Studies University. The study was granted an exemption on June 1, 2022 (Review No. 2022BC023). Therefore, the data collection procedures in this study align with established medical ethics principles and regulatory requirements.

: This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.