With the rapid progress in mobile healthcare and Internet medicine, the impact of telehealth and telemedicine on the satisfaction of patients and their willingness to travel has become a focus of the academic research community. This study analyses the differences between telehealth and telemedicine and their role in medical tourism. We examine how the information quality and communication quality of telehealth and telemedicine influence patient satisfaction, and their effects on patients’ willingness to undertake medical travel and on their medical travel behaviours. We conducted an empirical study on the use of telehealth and telemedicine and on medical travel behaviour in Azerbaijan using a survey for data collection. A total of 500 results were collected and analysed using SmartPLS 3.0. Results show that (1) the communication quality and information quality of telehealth and telemedicine and their effects on satisfaction have significantly positive influences on willingness to undertake medical travel; (2) the psychological expectations of value and cost (perceived value and perceived cost) have a positive influence on medical travel; and (3) willingness to participate in medical travel positively influences medical travel behaviour. Moreover, results of this study have implications for research on, and the practice of, using telehealth and telemedicine as they relate to medical tourism. This research may help improve knowledge about telehealth and telemedicine and understand the differences between them in detail. This empirical research model may also be useful for researchers from other countries who wish to measure medical travel behaviour.
Artificial intelligence can help physicians improve the accuracy of breast cancer diagnosis. However, the effectiveness of AI applications is limited by doctors’ adoption of the results recommended by the personalized medical decision support system. Our primary purpose is to study the impact of external case characteristics (ECC) on the effectiveness of the personalized medical decision support system for breast cancer assisted diagnosis (PMDSS-BCAD) in making accurate recommendations. Therefore, we designed a novel comprehensive framework for case-based reasoning (CBR) that takes the impact of external features of cases into account, made use of the naive Bayes and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithms (CBR-ECC), and developed a PMDSS-BCAD system by using the CBR-ECC model and external features as system components. Under the new case-based reasoning framework, the accuracy of the combined model of naive Bayes and KNN with an optimal K value of 2 is 99.40%. Moreover, in a real hospital scenario, users rated the PMDSS-BCAD system, which takes into account the external characteristics of the case, better than the original personalized system. These results suggest that PMDSS-BCD can not only provide doctors with more personalized and accurate results for auxiliary diagnosis, but also improve doctors’ trust in the results, so as to encourage doctors to adopt the results recommended by the personalized system.
This paper reveals the research hotspots and development directions of case-based reasoning in the field of health care, and proposes the framework and key technologies of medical knowledge service systems based on case-based reasoning (CBR) in the big data environment. The 2124 articles on medical CBR in the Web of Science were visualized and analyzed using a bibliometrics method, and a CBR-based knowledge service system framework was constructed in the medical Internet of all people, things and data resources environment. An intelligent construction method for the clinical medical case base and the gray case knowledge reasoning model were proposed. A cloud-edge collaboration knowledge service system was developed and applied in a pilot project. Compared with other diagnostic tools, the system provides case-based explanations for its predicted results, making it easier for physicians to understand and accept, so that they can make better decisions. The results show that the system has good interpretability, has better acceptance than the common intelligent decision support system, and strongly supports physician auxiliary diagnosis and treatment as well as clinical teaching.