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How to improve the doctor-patient relationship has been a continuing topic in academia and management and there have been several attempts to utilize online communications to facilitate healthcare. The application of information technology to create an “Internet + medical care” platform has upended the traditional medical service model in China. As an example of the application of the Internet by the healthcare system, this paper investigates a mobile online appointment system used by hospitals. Data on system use came from questionnaires submitted by 225 patients and analyzed by the structural equation model method. The results showed that patients perceived the hospital’s online appointment system as an attempt at transparency to which they reacted positively. The patients’ perception of transparency promoted trust in the hospital and the doctors and positively affected their feelings of satisfaction, which, of course, improved the doctor-patient relationship. Patients’ perceptions of transparency, trust in the hospitals and doctors, and feelings of satisfaction played a partial mediator role between the availability of an online appointment system and better doctor-patient relationships. There were significant gender differences among patients in terms of their feelings of trust and satisfaction with the new appointment method and whether it really improved the doctor-patient relationship.

We propose a sustainability-driven resource allocation algorithm for energy harvesting powered device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks. In this setup, D2D transmitters harvest energy from ambient energy sources and reuse the uplink cellular channels to perform transmission to the desired D2D receivers. Considering the time-varying and unpredictable nature of the harvested energy, the proposed algorithm ensures the energy sustainability-related quality-of-service with improved system capacity. To reach this goal, a statistical model based on the effective bandwidth/capacity is adopted to formulate the energy-harvesting/-consuming processes and evaluates the sustainability assurance in terms of the statistical outage exponent. Subsequently, we formulate the resource allocation problem with a view to maximizing the sum rate of the D2D links by jointly optimizing the power allocation and spectrum resource matching, meanwhile guaranteeing the energy sustainability requirements. By employing the Lagrangian dual method, we derive an analytical expression for the transmission power allocation and present two rules to match the cellular users with the D2D links for spectrum resource reuse. Our results reveal that both the power allocation and spectrum resource matching closely depend on the statistical outage exponent. With these theoretical analyses, we put forward a distributed subgradient-based iterative resource allocation algorithm with polynomial complexity. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed resource allocation algorithm can acquire a substantial sum-rate improvement.

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