---
title: "Patient experience on Saudi national digital health platform Sehhaty: analysis of 97,034 app revie"
id: "plos-one-22-patient-experience-in-national-digital-health-platforms-evidence-from-patient"
canonical_url: "https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/plos-one-22-patient-experience-in-national-digital-health-platforms-evidence-from-patient"
content_type: "clinical_feed_article"
specialty: "General"
source_name: "PLOS ONE (Medicine)"
source_url: "https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0360416"
published_at: "2026-10-22T14:00:00.000Z"
evidence_level: "Journal Feed"
license: "CC-BY-NC-4.0 / Informational Use"
---
# Patient experience on Saudi national digital health platform Sehhaty: analysis of 97,034 app revie
## Provenance & Clinical Metadata
- **Canonical URL:** https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/plos-one-22-patient-experience-in-national-digital-health-platforms-evidence-from-patient
- **Specialty:** [General](https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/general.md)
- **Primary Source:** PLOS ONE (Medicine)
- **Source URL:** [Original Journal Publication](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0360416)
- **Published At:** 2026-10-22T14:00:00.000Z
- **Evidence Rating:** Journal Feed
## Executive GIST (TL;DR)
- The study analyzed 97,034 Google Play reviews of **Sehhaty**, the Saudi **national digital health platform**, posted between 2019 and 2026. - Investigators used an inductive qualitative coding approach; the source reported development of a nine-dimension **patient experience** framework derived from user-generated feedback. - Reviews reflected multiple platform functions including appointment booking, vaccination services, access to electronic health records, prescription management, and teleconsultation. - The cohort showed marked variation in experience across different healthcare service categories, indicating that improvement priorities are service-specific rather than uniform. - Longitudinal analysis reported a temporal shift: early reviews emphasized technical failures (login, bugs), later reviews raised accessibility, integration, and continuity-of-care concerns as the platform matured. - Data used in the study are publicly available (Figshare link reported by the authors); funding was provided by King Faisal University (grant cited). - Authors noted that app-store reviews offer large-scale, real-world evidence that can move beyond ratings or sentiment analysis to generate decision-ready, service-level improvement priorities. - The study team observed that prior literature focused on sentiment, rating, or topic modeling, and that this work addressed gaps by mapping reviews to care processes and organizational service needs. - The authors identified limitations and open questions about representativeness, the constraints of review-based inference, and the need for complementary evaluation methods (details reported in the source).
## Clinical Analysis & Structured Key Points
Patient experience in National digital health platforms: Evidence from patient-generated feedback in Saudi Arabia | PLOS One Browse Subject Areas ? Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here . Article Authors Metrics Comments Media Coverage Reader Comments Figures Figures Abstract National digital health platforms are becoming fundamental components of modern healthcare delivery; however, patient experience is commonly assessed using overall ratings or sentiment analysis, providing limited understanding of the specific dimensions that influence digital healthcare quality and service improvement. This study aimed to develop a multidimensional framework for understanding patient experience in a national digital health platform, examine variation across healthcare services, investigate changes over time, and identify evidence-based improvement priorities. A qualitative analysis was conducted using 97,034 Google Play reviews of Sehhaty, the Saudi national digital health platform, posted between 2019 and 2026. Reviews were analyzed using an inductive coding approach to develop a patient experience framework, followed by comparative analyses across healthcare services and longitudinal analyses across successive stages of platform development. Nine patient experience dimensions were identified. Patient experience differed considerably across healthcare services, indicating that improvement priorities were service-specific rather than uniform across the platform. Longitudinal analyses showed a shift from predominantly technical concerns during early deployment toward challenges involving service accessibility, integration, continuity of care, as the platform matured. These findings enabled the identification of service-specific priorities for improving digital healthcare delivery. Patient experience in national digital health platforms is multidimensional, service-dependent, and evolves alongside platform maturity. The proposed framework extends approaches based primarily on ratings or sentiment by transforming large-scale patient-generated feedback into actionable evidence for healthcare quality improvement and continuous evaluation of patient-centered digital health services. Citation: Albesher AS (2026) Patient experience in National digital health platforms: Evidence from patient-generated feedback in Saudi Arabia. PLoS One 21(10): e0360416. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360416 Editor: Farshid Danesh, Islamic World Science & Technology Monitoring and Citation Institute (ISC), IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF Received: August 6, 2026; Accepted: September 26, 2026; Published: October 22, 2026 Copyright: © 2026 Abdulmohsen Saud Albesher. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: The dataset analyzed during this study is publicly available in Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.33071924 . It contains publicly available Google Play reviews and associated metadata collected from the national digital health platform evaluated in this study. Funding: This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research, Vice Presidency for Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia [GRANT No. KFU264010]. The funder provided support in the form of salary for the author, A.S.A., but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific role of the author is articulated in the Author Contributions section. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. 1. Introduction Digital health platforms have become an important component of contemporary healthcare systems [ 1 , 2 ]. They enable patients to access a wide range of services through mobile applications, including appointment scheduling, vaccination services, electronic health records, prescription management, and teleconsultation. Their expansion has reshaped interactions between healthcare organizations and beneficiaries and has become increasingly central to national digital transformation initiatives [ 3 – 5 ]. As a result, ensuring a positive patient experience has become a major objective for healthcare providers, application developers, and policymakers. In Saudi Arabia, digital health has expanded substantially under Vision 2030 [ 6 ]. Sehhaty has emerged as one of the country’s main national digital health platforms [ 7 , 8 ]. Sehhaty integrates multiple healthcare services into a single mobile platform and supports activities such as appointment management, access to medical reports, review of personal health records, and vaccination-related services [ 8 , 9 ]. Comparable large-scale patient-facing digital health platforms also exist internationally, but they vary in structure, functions, and scope of integration. England’s NHS App provides a national ‘digital front door’ for services such as appointment booking, prescription ordering, access to records, and vaccination certification, yet its functions are partly mediated through local general practice systems and are therefore not always available uniformly across users [ 10 ]. Brunei’s BruHealth similarly operates at national scale and links the patient-facing app to centralized health records and vaccination services, whereas Türkiye’s e-Nabız is organized primarily as a national personal health record system with broad interoperability across health facilities and public institutions [ 11 , 12 ]. These examples show that integrated national platforms are an established international model, but their architectures and service configurations differ, making Sehhaty a relevant case for examining patient experience within a single government-led mobile platform that combines multiple healthcare functions. As the platform has evolved across successive releases, users have continuously documented their experiences through public app-store reviews, creating a large source of real-world evidence on expectations, frustrations, and perceived service quality. User-generated reviews are increasingly valuable for evaluating healthcare applications because they capture authentic experiences outside controlled study settings [ 13 ]. Unlike questionnaires or usability studies with relatively small samples, app-store reviews provide large-scale feedback from diverse users over extended periods [ 14 , 15 ]. Prior work shows that such reviews can reveal usability problems, software bugs, privacy concerns, account-access failures, feature requests, and other determinants of user satisfaction in mHealth applications [ 15 , 16 ]. Reviews also provide richer context than rating scores alone, which are often insufficient for understanding the specific causes of satisfaction or dissatisfaction [ 15 , 17 ]. Prior app-review research has established the value of large-scale user reviews for identifying recurrent concerns such as usability problems, technical failures, privacy issues, content quality, support needs, and feature requests across diverse mHealth domains [ 14 – 19 ]. However, this literature has been dominated by sentiment classification, rating analysis, topic modeling, or broad quality assessment, with less attention to using reviews to develop a multidimensional account of patient experience in relation to healthcare services and care processes [ 14 , 15 , 18 , 19 ]. This limitation matters because digital health platforms are not single-purpose tools; they combine heterogeneous healthcare functions, and the experience requirements of those functions can differ by task, interaction pattern, and care context [ 14 , 20 ]. Existing digital patient experience work also shows that experience is shaped by multiple domains beyond interface usability alone, including functionality, organizational context, and patient capability. A second limitation is that patient experience is often analyzed as a single homogeneous phenomenon even though users evaluate different digital health functions differently. Existing review-based studies have mostly examined either broad app subcategories or single-purpose applications, while studies of more unified platforms emphasize cross-cutting problems such as feature overlap, poor customizability, and fragmented user journeys [ 15 , 21 ]. What remains less clear is how patient experience varies across distinct healthcare service categories within one integrated national platform, where records access, appointments, vaccination services, and consultations may impose different expectations and failure points [ 22 , 23 ]. A third limitation is the lack of longitudinal evidence on how patient experience changes as digital health platforms mature. Recent mHealth review studies explicitly identify this limitation and call for analyses that account for time, platform change, and evolving user concerns [ 24 ]. Broader digital health research also suggests that maturity is associated with differences in patient experience and service impact [ 25 ]. Yet temporal analyses remain uncommon in national public healthcare apps, leaving open the question of whether user concerns shift from basic technical failures, such as login, registration, and stability problems, toward broader service-quality and coordination issues as platforms expand [ 26 ]. A fourth limitation is that review mining often stops at descriptive insight rather than producing decision-ready priorities for healthcare organizations and policymakers. Although review studies often provide recommendations for developers or identify unmet needs, they less often translate large-scale review evidence into service-specific priorities for organizational improvement and decision-making [ 27 ]. To address these gaps, this study presents a large-scale qualitative content analysis of 97,034 Google Play reviews of the Saudi national digital health platform Sehhaty. Rather than treating app reviews as indicators of overall satisfaction, the study uses patient-generated feedback as a source of evidence for understanding patient experience, evaluating integrated digital health services, and supporting continuous improvement of national health information systems. The study develops an inductively derived Patient Experience Framework consisting of 9 dimensions that characterize beneficiaries’ experiences with digital health services. Building on this framework, the study compares patient experience across multiple healthcare service categories, examines how those experiences evolve across application maturity phases, and identifies service-specific improvement priorities derived directly from beneficiary feedback. Accordingly, this study addresses the following research questions: RQ1: What dimensions characterize patient experience in digital health applications? RQ2: How do patient experience dimensions differ across digital health service categories? RQ3: How do patient experience dimensions evolve across application maturity phases? RQ4: What improvement priorities emerge from beneficiaries’ reviews across different digital health services? This study contributes to the health information systems literature in four ways. First, it develops an inductively derived multidimensional framework for understanding patient experience in national digital health platforms using large-scale patient-generated feedback. Second, it demonstrates that patient experience should be interpreted at the level of individual digital health services rather than treating integrated national platforms as homogeneous systems. Third, it provides longitudinal evidence showing how patient experience evolves across successive stages of platform maturity. Finally, it translates routinely generated patient feedback into service-specific priorities that can support continuous evaluation, healthcare quality improvement, and evidence-informed decision making. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The Literature Review examines related work on digital health applications, patient experience, and app review analysis. The Methodology describes the research design and four-stage analytical workflow, followed by the Results addressing the four research questions. The Discussion considers the findings in relation to previous research and digital health practice. Finally, the Limitations and Future Research outline the study constraints and directions for further investigation, followed by the Conclusion. 2. Literature review Previous research reveals four important gaps in understanding patient experience in national digital health platforms. Most review-mining studies still emphasize generic analytics over patient experience, rarely compare services within one national platform, seldom examine change across platform maturity, and infrequently translate reviews into decision-ready priorities. The overall literature supports that framing while also showing that digital patient experience, app-review analytics, and national platform evaluation have each matured along partly separate lines [ 14 , 22 , 28 ]. 2.1. Digital patient experience in national digital health platforms Digital patient experience is now understood as a multidimensional construct shaped by technology, functionality, interaction design, patient capability, and organizational context rather than by usability alone [ 22 ]. That broader framing has emerged because digital health now spans apps, portals, telemedicine, records, and service ecosystems, making patient experience inseparable from how care is organized and delivered across digital touchpoints [ 22 ]. At the same time, the evaluation literature remains fragmented. Collectively, existing app usability and quality scales are aimed mainly at professionals, with very limited support for patient-facing assessment and little theoretical grounding [ 29 ]. More recent questionnaire work has moved toward multidimensional user experience assessment, but standardization remains weak across digital health domains, including virtual reality applications, where diverse instruments still lack conceptual consistency [ 30 ]. Even newer patient-oriented tools such as pSUAPP are designed for bounded clinical follow-up contexts rather than for large public platforms that bundle multiple health services into one interface [ 31 ]. These issues become more pronounced in national digital health platforms, where patients interact with appointment booking, telemedicine, medication management, records access, and health information inside a single service environment [ 21 , 32 ]. Unified platforms promise accessibility, convenience, and continuity, but they also expose users to failures in interoperability, uneven feature integration, and organizational fragmentation across care functions [ 9 , 22 ]. Saudi studies similarly reflect these challenges. Reviews of national digital health adoption emphasize growing awareness and uptake, yet practitioner studies consistently identify technical barriers, workflow disruption, poor compatibility with existing systems, and training or support limitations as major constraints on effective use [ 9 , 33 , 34 ]. Earlier studies evaluating Saudi digital health applications primarily focused on usability and user perceptions of individual COVID-19 applications such as Sehhaty, Mawid, Tawakkalna, and Tabaud, highlighting technical and usability challenges but not examining patient experience across multiple healthcare services within one integrated platform [ 23 ]. Patient-centered digital healthcare research therefore increasingly treats experience as an implementation and governance issue, not only a design issue. Recent readiness work argues that patient perspectives should be integrated into usability testing, co-creation, clinical protocol design, implementation monitoring, and the use of patient-reported experience measures across the technology life cycle [ 35 ]. That shift aligns with broader patient experience scholarship, which argues that digital feedback becomes useful evidence only when captured through systematic frameworks that can support service improvement and health technology assessment [ 32 ]. 2.2. App review analysis in digital health App-store reviews have become a valuable source of real-world patient feedback because they capture unsolicited experiences from large and diverse user populations over time. Across mental health, maternal health, multiple sclerosis, depression self-management, and general mHealth platforms, review-based studies consistently show that users comment on functionality, technical performance, content quality, privacy, support, personalization, and feature requests [ 36 – 38 ]. Reviews also provide explanatory detail that star ratings alone cannot capture, including why users abandon apps, what kinds of customization they want, and how specific failures interfere with care-related tasks [ 37 , 38 ]. Recent Saudi studies have similarly demonstrated that combining user-review analysis with usability evaluation provides valuable insights into user satisfaction, functionality problems, and design improvements in specialized healthcare applications [ 39 ]. Methodologically, this literature combines qualitative interpretation with computational review mining. Similar review-mining approaches have also been successfully applied outside healthcare, demonstrating their usefulness for identifying usability issues across large collections of user reviews [ 40 ]. Some studies use inductive thematic or content analysis to identify recurring strengths, weaknesses, and unmet needs in user narratives [ 36 , 37 , 41 ]. Others apply machine learning, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, or BERTopic to scale classification and uncover dominant themes across tens of thousands of reviews [ 24 , 28 ]. These approaches have made it possible to compare large app ecosystems, identify predictors of satisfaction, and detect feature-level concerns such as usability, content variety, billing, trust, responsiveness, and consultation availability [ 24 , 28 ]. Yet the dominant analytic lens remains narrower than patient experience. Many studies still treat reviews primarily as inputs for sentiment classification, rating prediction, or broad quality categorization rather than as evidence about digitally mediated care experience. Even when thematic analysis is added, the output often remains a list of positive and negative app features instead of a structured account of experience across access, continuity, communication, and information use [ 28 , 41 , 42 ]. A second limitation is the unit of analysis. Most review-mining studies analyze the application as a single entity, even when users are interacting with different functions that may generate distinct expectations and problems [ 36 , 37 ]. This app-level framing works reasonably well for single-purpose tools, but it is less informative for integrated public platforms that combine appointments, consultation, prescriptions, records, and follow-up services within one digital interface [ 21 ]. A third limitation is the relative absence of longitudinal analysis. Several studies explicitly note that user experience predictors may evolve over time and call for temporal designs, but most review-based analyses remain cross-sectional or confined to short review windows [ 24 ]. This matters because digital health platforms undergo repeated releases, service expansion, and changing policy contexts, all of which can shift the salience of technical, access, and coordination concerns [ 14 , 34 ]. A fourth limitation is the weak translation from findings to organizational action. Although review studies often provide design recommendations or ide
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