Search results

Doctor–medical institution collaboration (DMIC) services are an emerging service mode in focal online health communities (OHCs). This new service mode is anticipated to affect user satisfaction and doctors' engagement behaviors. However, whether and how DMIC occurs is still ambiguous because the topic is rarely examined. To bridge this gap, this study explores doctors' participation in DMIC services and its effects on their online performance, as well as its effect on patients' evaluation of them on OHC platforms.

The authors propose hypotheses based on structural holes theory. A unique dataset obtained from one of the most popular OHCs in China is used to test the hypotheses, and difference-in-differences estimation is adopted to test the causality of the relationship.

The results demonstrate that providing DMIC services improves doctors' online consultation performance and patients' evaluations of them but has no significant effect on doctors' knowledge-sharing performance on OHC platforms. Doctors' knowledge-sharing performance and consultation performance mediate the relationship between participation in DMIC services and patients' evaluation of doctors. Regarding doctors' participation in DMIC services, its impact on doctors' consultation performance and patients' evaluation of them is weaker for doctors with higher professional titles than for doctors with lower professional titles.

The findings clarify the value creation mechanisms of online collaboration between doctors and medical institutions and thereafter facilitate doctors' participation in DMIC services and enhance the sustainable development of OHCs.

The purpose of this research paper is to explore the determinants of patients' service choices between telephone consultation and text consultation in online health communities (OHCs).

This study utilized an empirical model based on the elaboration likelihood model and examined the effect of information, regarding service quality (the central route) and service price (the peripheral route), using online health consultation data from one of the largest OHCs in China.

The logistic regression results indicated that both physician- and patient-generated information can influence the patients' service choices; service price signals will lead patients to cheaper options. However, individual motivations, disease risk and consulting experience change a patients' information processing regarding central and peripheral cues.

Previous researchers have investigated the mechanism of patient behavior in OHCs; however, the researchers have not focused on the patients' choices regarding the multiple health services provided in OHCs. The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for future researchers, OHC designers and physicians.

The advent of online live streaming platforms (OLSPs) and online health communities (OHCs) has expedited the integration of traditional medical services with Internet new media technology. Since the practice of physicians conducting live streaming is a relatively new phenomenon, the potential cross-platform effects of such physicians’ live streaming have not received adequate attention.

This study collected data from 616 physicians specializing in cardiology, obstetrics and gynecology and neurology between April and November 2022 on Live.Baidu.com and WeDoctor.com. It constructed a panel data set comprising a total of 4,928 observations over an 8-month period and validated the model using empirical analysis with the fixed-effects method.

We find evidence of cross-platform influence in online healthcare. Physicians’ live streaming behavior (whether live or not and the heat of their streams) on OLSPs positively impacts both their consultation and reputation on OHCs. Additionally, physicians’ ability positively moderates the relationships between live streaming heat and their performance (in terms of consultation volume and reputation) on OHCs. However, ability does not moderate the relationship between physicians’ live streaming status (live or not) and their performance (in terms of consultation and reputation) on OHCs. Furthermore, the attractive appearance of the physicians also significantly moderates the impact in a positive way.

This is one of the pioneering studies on physicians’ live streaming. The study offers vital guidance for physicians and patients utilizing dual platforms and holds significant reference value for platform operators (such as OLSPs and OHCs) aiming to optimize platform operations and for the government in policy formulation and industry regulation.

The online health community's success depends on doctors' active participation, so it is essential to understand the factors that affect doctors' knowledge contribution behavior in the online health communities. From the perspective of peer effect, this paper discusses the influence of focal doctors' peers on focal doctors' knowledge contribution behavior and the mechanism behind it. This paper aims to solve these problems.

Empirical data of 1,938 doctors were collected from a Chinese online health community, and propensity score matching and ordinary least squares were employed to verify the proposed theoretical model.

The results show that the presence of focal doctors' peers in online health communities has a positive effect on the knowledge contribution behavior of focal doctors, and the economic returns and social returns of focal doctors' peers have a significant mediating effect.

This paper discusses focal doctors' knowledge contribution behavior from the perspective of peer effect. It enhances the understanding of focal doctors' behavior in the online health communities by exploring the mediating role of their peers' economic and social returns. The results of this paper extend the research in the field of peer effect and online health and provide management implications and suggestions for online health platforms and doctors.

Social media facilitates the communication and the relationship between healthcare professionals and patients. However, limited research has examined the role of social media in a physicians' online return. This study, therefore, investigates physicians' online economic and social capital return in relation to physicians' use of social media and consumer engagement.

Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with fixed effects (FE) and panel data collected from Sina Weibo and Sina Health, this study analyzes the impact of physicians' social media use and consumer engagement on physicians' online return and the moderation effect of professional seniority.

The results reveal that physicians' use of social media and consumer sharing behavior positively affect physicians' online economic return. In contrast, consumer engagement positively impacts physicians' online social capital return. While professional seniority enhances the effect of physicians' social media use on online economic return, professional seniority only enhances the relationship between consumers' sharing behavior to the posts and physicians' online social capital return when professional seniority comes to consumer engagement.

This study reveals the different roles of social media use and consumer engagement in physicians' online return. The results also extend and examine the social media affordances theory in online healthcare communities and social media platforms.

Effectively engaging patients is critical for the sustainable development of online health communities (OHCs). Although physicians’ general knowledge-sharing, which is free to the public, represents essential resources of OHCs that have been shown to promote patient engagement, little is known about whether such knowledge-sharing can backfire when superfluous knowledge-sharing is perceived as overwhelming and anxiety-provoking. Thus, this study aims to gain a comprehensive understanding of the role of general knowledge-sharing in OHCs by exploring the spillover effects of the depth and breadth of general knowledge-sharing on patient engagement.

The research model is established based on a knowledge-based view and the literature on knowledge-sharing in OHCs. Then the authors test the research model and associated hypotheses with objective data from a leading OHC.

Although counterintuitive, the findings revealed an inverted U-shape relationship between general knowledge-sharing (depth and breadth of knowledge-sharing) and patient engagement that is positively associated with physicians’ number of patients. Specifically, the positive effects of depth and breadth of general knowledge-sharing increase and then decrease as the quantity of general knowledge-sharing grows. In addition, physicians’ offline and online professional status negatively moderated these curvilinear relationships.

This study further enriches the literature on knowledge-sharing and the operations of OHCs from a novel perspective while also offering significant specific implications for OHCs practitioners.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was declared as a pandemic since COVID-19's widespread outbreak and the hospitality industry has been the hardest hit due to lockdown. Consequently, hospitality workers are suffering from the negative aspects of mental health. In the event of such a crisis, this study aims to explore the link between unemployment and home isolation to the willingness to choose electronic consultation (e-consultation) by exploiting psychological ill-being and behavioural intention (BI) with marital status as a moderator.

A quantitative methodology is applied to primary data collected from 310 workers from the hospitality industry through an online survey.

Findings of this study suggest that the usage of the e-consultation service can be adopted using three levels. There are valid reasons to conclude unemployment and home isolation are linked to higher rates of psychological health behaviours, which can result in stigma, loss of self-worth and increased mortality. The adverse effect is higher for single individuals than for married people.

The study focussed on e-consultation, BI coupled with the Fishbein scale and a classification model for the prediction of willingness to choose e-consultation with the extension of Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB).

Knowledge sharing in online health communities (OHCs) disrupts consumers' health information-seeking behavior patterns such as seeking health information and consulting. Based on social exchange theory, this study explores how the two dimensions of experts' free knowledge sharing (general and specific) affect customer transactional and nontransactional engagement behavior and how the quality of experts' free knowledge sharing moderates the above relationships.

We adopted negative binomial regression models using homepage data of 2,982 experts crawled from Haodf.com using Python.

The results show that experts' free general knowledge sharing and free specific knowledge sharing positively facilitate both transactional and nontransactional engagement of consumers. The results also demonstrate that experts' efforts in knowledge-sharing quality weaken the positive effect of their knowledge-sharing quantity on customer engagement.

This study provides new insights into the importance of experts' free knowledge sharing in OHCs. This study also revealed a “trade-off” between experts' knowledge-sharing quality and quantity. These findings could help OHCs managers optimize knowledge-sharing recommendation mechanisms to encourage experts to share more health knowledge voluntarily and improve the efficiency of healthcare information dissemination to promote customer engagement.

This study aims to study the mechanisms and conditions of users' intention to continue to use online health platforms from an information technology (IT) affordance perspective.

b This research proposes that a critical affordance effect on an online health platform, users' intention to continue the use of the platform, is affected by five platform affordances via two actualized affordances (i.e. perceived benefits (PBs) and online engagement (OE)). Perceived health threat moderates the effect generated by affordance actualization. A dataset involving 409 users from the “Ping An Health” platform was collected through an online survey and analyzed to validate the research hypotheses.

The data analysis results confirm that the proposed online health platform affordances affect users' PBs and OE, which influence users' intentions to continue using the platform. Perceived threats (perceived vulnerability (PVU) and perceived severity (PSE)) moderate the relationship between PBs and continuance intention (CI) and between OE and CI.

The research provides important recommendations for online health platform designers to develop IT affordances that can support users' needs for healthcare services.

Limited studies investigated why users continue participating in online diagnosis and treatment. This study provides a new perspective to expand the affordance framework by combining technology features and user health behavior. The study also emphasizes the importance of perceived threats in IT use.