Nearly 100,000 App Reviews Map Patient Experience on Saudi Arabia’s Health Platform

A new study of Sehhaty, Saudi Arabia’s national digital health platform, analyzed 97,034 Google Play reviews posted between 2019 and 2026 to build a multidimensional picture of patient experience that simple star ratings cannot provide.

Researchers led by Abdulmohsen Saud Albesher used an inductive coding approach, letting themes emerge from the patient-generated feedback itself rather than imposing predefined categories. This process yielded nine distinct dimensions of patient experience, offering a structured framework for evaluating digital healthcare quality.

The analysis revealed that patient experience differed considerably across the platform’s healthcare services. Improvement priorities, the study concludes, are service-specific rather than uniform, meaning a single platform-wide fix would not address the distinct pain points reported for individual services.

Longitudinal analysis across successive stages of platform development uncovered a clear evolution in user concerns. During early deployment, reviews centered predominantly on technical issues, but as the platform matured, feedback shifted toward challenges involving service accessibility, integration, and continuity of care.

The study reports this shift within Sehhaty specifically: as technical complaints receded in the feedback, patient attention moved to how well services connect and whether care remains continuous across touchpoints. The authors characterize patient experience on the platform as changing alongside its maturity, rather than remaining fixed at deployment.

Traditional assessment methods, such as overall ratings or sentiment analysis, compress this rich feedback into a single score or emotional valence. The study argues that such approaches provide limited understanding of the specific dimensions that influence digital healthcare quality and service improvement.

By contrast, the nine-dimension framework transforms large-scale patient feedback into actionable evidence. It allows administrators to identify evidence-based improvement priorities for each service and to track how those priorities change as the platform evolves, supporting continuous evaluation of patient-centered digital health services.

The findings position patient experience in national digital health platforms as multidimensional, service-dependent, and evolving with platform maturity. Within the scope of this study, they show how patient-generated feedback on a single national platform can be converted into structured dimensions that inform service-specific improvement and ongoing evaluation of patient-centered digital health services.

Subject of Research: Patient experience in National digital health platforms: Evidence from patient-generated feedback in Saudi Arabia

Article Title: Patient experience in National digital health platforms: Evidence from patient-generated feedback in Saudi Arabia

Article References: Albesher, A. S. (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

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360416

Keywords: digital health, patient experience, Sehhaty, Saudi Arabia, Google Play reviews, qualitative analysis, healthcare quality, service improvement, mobile health applications, Patient, experience, National