A Proposal of Diseases Words Classifying Method for Medical Hospitality

In recent years, hospitality in health care has become a very important service for patients and their families who have some anxiety factors regarding diseases. However, it is difficult for medical staff to grasp some potential anxiety factors of patients and their families during medical examination and treatment. The purpose of this study is to propose methods of classifying potential anxiety factors for patients and families that are not understood by medical staff. In this paper, several methods of classifying potential anxiety factors for patients and their families are examined using written content by Japanese users with diseases on the “Yahoo! Answers” website. First, the words are extracted from the content regarding each disease by morpheme analysis. Next, the classification of the extracted words is obtained by (1) counting the occurrences of each word, (2) counting the appearance ratio of each word, (3) using correlation analysis, (4) counting the questions containing each word, and (5) counting the combinations of each word in the questions. Moreover, the obtained correlation between the word and each disease is judged according to the knowledge of the medical staff. As a result, the method of classifying the words based on the number of combinations of each word in the questions shows a tendency to agree with the knowledge of medical staff when compared to the words classified by other methods.