Objective To study the current situation of WeChat public platforms in 15 provincial hospitals in Hubei Province.Methods We searched the website of National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, website of Health Commission of Hubei Province, and the official website of each hospital. The WeChat public platforms of 15 provincial hospitals in Hubei Province was determined as the research object. Samples were taken in July, 2019 and the observation cut-off point was on October 30, 2019. All the contents released by the WeChat public platforms in July were counted. Literature research, descriptive statistics, content analysis, WeChat transmission index analysis, observation indicators and other methods were used for analysis and research.Results Among the 15 hospitals, 14 hospitals (93.3%) had established 20 WeChat public platforms, and 5 hospitals (33.3%) simultaneously opened service accounts and subscription accounts. The functions of serving the patients’ medical experience mainly included identity registration, appointment registration, information inquiry, patient feedback, intelligent medical guidance, etc. WeChat tweets were mainly divided into 38.0% of popular medical science, 11.4% of hospital news, 15.8% of medical service, 13.6% of party and government construction, and 21.2% of patient interaction. The monthly push times of 6 WeChat public platforms (30.0%) were less than 4 times. The monthly original rate of WeChat public platform tweets was 16.3%. Among the top 10 WeChat public platforms in the WeChat communication index, 8 (80.0%) were service accounts. There was a big gap in the dissemination effect of tweets.Conclusions The WeChat public platform of provincial hospitals in Hubei Province has problems such as single type of WeChat public platform, imperfect service functions, unreasonable tweets frequency, insufficient originality of tweets, and uneven communication effects. It is necessary to enrich platform types, improve platform functions, ameliorate the frequency of tweets, improve the originality of tweets, and pay attention to communication effects.

Citation： JIN Huipeng, HAN Shixi, FENG Zhanchun. Analysis on the present situation of WeChat public platforms in provincial hospitals of Hubei Province. West China Medical Journal, 2020, 35(9): 1101-1107. doi: 10.7507/1002-0179.201912274 Copy