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This study examined the influence of income and health insurance on the health-seeking behaviour of rural residents, addressing the concerns of endogeneity and heterogeneity bias.

A two-stage residual inclusion was utilised to correct self-selection-based endogeneity problems arising from health insurance membership.

This study provides support for Andersen's behavioural model (ABM). Income and health insurance positively stimulate rural residents' use of modern healthcare services, but the effect of insurance risks a downward bias if treated as exogenous. Further, the effect of health insurance differs between males and females and between adults and the elderly.

This study advances the literature, arguing that, within the ABM framework, enabling (i.e. income and insurance) and predisposing factors (i.e. age and gender) complement each other in explaining rural residents' use of modern health services.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-03-2023-0223

The purpose of the study is to comprehend medical service quality, information quality and system quality toward actual use of Tele-Health in rural India. The study further validates the impact of the actual use of Tele-Health on sustainable development, thus providing implications to improve upon the Tele-Health penetration in India.

Data was collected from 326 healthcare practitioners practicing Tele-Health in North Indian states and Structural Equation Modeling was applied to validate the conceptual framework.

The results indicated that medical service quality, information quality and system quality influence Tele-Health behavioral intentions which in turn impact actual use and sustainable development. This research draws upon a conceptual framework to deepen our understanding of Tele-Health by providing an all-inclusive overview.

The massive topography of India with a prime rural populace instills the need for timely healthcare facilities. Tele-Health is a solution to all these problems but is at a nascent stage. Therefore, there is a vital need to study the factors which improve the penetration of Tele-Health in the Indian context. The model that emerged from the study may be validated by other Indian sub-continental countries so that Tele-Health may be implemented hassle-free.

Disasters and pandemics pose challenges to health-care provision. Accordingly, the need for adopting innovative approach is required in providing care to patient. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to present telehealth as an innovative approach for providing care to patients and reducing spread of the infection and advocates for the adoption of telehealth for digitalized treatment of patients.

An integrative review methodology of existing evidence was conducted to provide implications for integration of telehealth for digitalized treatment of patients. This paper draws on Technology Organization Environment (TOE) framework to develop a model and propositions to investigate the factors that influence telehealth adoption from the perspective of the supply side and the demand side of medical services.

Findings from this study discuss applications adopted for telehealth and recommendations on how telehealth can be adopted for medical-care delivery. More importantly, the findings and propositions of this study can act as a roadmap to potential research opportunities within and beyond the pandemic. In addition, findings from this study help provide guidelines on how health practitioners can rapidly integrate telehealth into practice for public health emergencies.

This study identifies the social, technological and organizational factors that influence telehealth adoption, and opportunities of adopting telehealth during the public health emergencies. This study concludes that specific policy changes to improve integration of interoperable solutions; data security; better physical infrastructures; broadband access; better transition and workflow balance; availability of funding and remuneration; regulations and reimbursement; awareness; and training will improve telehealth adoption during public health emergencies.

The success of online health communities (OHCs) depends on maintaining long-term relationships with physicians and preventing churn. Even so, the reasons for physician churn are poorly understood. In this study, an empirical model was proposed from a social influence perspective to explore the effects of online social influence and offline social influence on physician churn, as well as the moderating effect of their online returns.

The empirical data of 4,145 physicians from a Chinese OHC, and probit regression models were employed to verify the proposed theoretical model.

The results suggest that physicians' churn intention is influenced by online and offline social influences, and the offline social influence is more powerful. Physicians' reputational and economic returns could weaken the effect of online social influence on churn intention. However, physicians' economic returns could strengthen the effect of offline social influence on churn intention.

This research study is the first attempt to explore physician churn and divides the social influence into online and offline social influences according to the source of social relationship. The findings contribute to the literature on e-Health, user churn and social influence and provide management implications for OHC managers.

Free knowledge sharing in the online health community has been widely documented. However, whether free knowledge sharing can help physicians accumulate popularity and further the accumulated popularity can help physicians attract patients remain unclear. To unveil these gaps, this study aims to examine how physicians' popularity are affected by their free knowledge sharing, how the relationship between free knowledge sharing and popularity is moderated by professional capital, and how the popularity finally impacts patients' attraction.

The authors collect a panel dataset from Hepatitis B within an online health community platform with 10,888 observations from April 2020 to August 2020. The authors develop a model that integrates free knowledge sharing, popularity, professional capital, and patients' attraction. The hierarchical regression model is used to for examining the impact of free knowledge sharing on physicians' popularity and further investigating the impact of popularity on patients' attraction.

The authors find that the quantity of articles acted as the heuristic cue and the quality of articles acted as the systematic cue have positive effect on physicians' popularity, and this effect is strengthened by physicians' professional capital. Furthermore, physicians' popularity positively influences their patients' attraction.

This study reveals the aggregation of physicians' popularity and patients' attraction within online health communities and provides practical implications for managers in online health communities.

This study aims to explore the perceptions of quality of life among older Thai adults with hypertension.

A descriptive qualitative design was used. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 40 older adults. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data.

The analyses were divided into six major themes: happiness in life; health and functionality; activity in social relationships; religion anchor; autonomy to manage their own life; and security in finances and environment.

The findings can guide health care professionals and policymakers when planning and implementing interventions and policies for improving the quality of life of older adults, particularly that of rural older adults with low incomes.

The findings showed minor differences between urban and rural older adults in financial security, where the rural participants expressed greater financial insecurity than the urban counterparts. However, no other major differences emerged.

Waiting time, as an important predictor of queue abandonment and patient satisfaction, is important for resource utilization and patient experience management. Medical institutions have given top priority to reforming the appointment system for many years; however, whether the increased information transparency brought about by the appointment scheduling mechanism could improve patient waiting time is not well understood. In this study, the authors examine the effects of information transparency in reducing patient waiting time from an uncertainty perspective.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment in a tertiary academic hospital, the authors analyze over one million observational patient visit records and design the propensity score matching plus the difference in difference (PSM-DID) model and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to address this issue.

The authors confirm that, on average, improved information transparency significantly reduces the waiting time for patients by approximately 6.43 min, a 4.90% reduction. The authors identify three types of uncertainties (resource, process and outcome uncertainty) in the patient visit process that affect patients' waiting time. Moreover, information transparency moderates the relationship between three sources of uncertainties and waiting time.

The authors’ work not only provides important theoretical explanations for the patient-level factors of in-clinic waiting time and the reasons for information technology (IT)-enabled appointment scheduling by time slot (ITASS) to shorten patient waiting time and improve patient experience but also provides potential solutions for further exploration of measures to reduce patient waiting time.

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.

While spontaneous and voluntary knowledge contribution in online communities promotes value co-creation, dysfunctional knowledge behaviors hamper the effectiveness and development of such communities. The study conceptualizes physicians' proactive knowledge sharing and knowledge withholding behaviors in physician-driven online health communities (OHCs) and integrates the theories of role identity as well as communal and exchange relationships to understand the root causes and motivations behind these two types of knowledge behaviors.

The authors collected survey data from 166 users from one of the largest physician-driven OHCs in China and applied the covariance-based structural equation modeling approach to test the hypotheses.

The findings suggest that (1) physicians' professional role identity had a positive indirect effect on proactive knowledge sharing behaviors through communal motivation, and work pressure weakened this indirect effect; and (2) professional role identity had a negative indirect impact on knowledge withholding behaviors through exchange motivation.

This study extends proactive knowledge sharing and knowledge withholding behaviors from the organizational management domain to the online environment, exploring the underlying causes and motivations behind both behaviors in the unique context of physician-driven OHCs. The findings offer practical suggestions for the effective management of OHC platforms, as well as policy implications that respond to the workforce shortage of healthcare providers, a crisis that is unfolding globally.

This paper proposes a Web-based patient portal based on the electronic medical record. Such a portal can allow patients to manage their own health care, reduce health-care visits and significantly improve the quality of their health care.

A patient portal prototype and an accompanying online survey were distributed to assess the adoption readiness among a group of people in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The results from 470 survey participants demonstrated an enhanced awareness of this technology, and support the study hypotheses indicating that both intrinsic and extrinsic factors are important when considering the implementation of a patient portal in the UAE.

This study adds value to the few research studies undertaken in the Middle East discussing online health information technology and its adoption and usage among the population at large. The extended technology acceptance model, which contains two additional constructs, had not been previously validated in terms of a patient portal in the UAE, according to the author’s knowledge, adding more value. The UAE’s health-care system must use the benefits from the available IT infrastructure to provide a user-friendly online portal to encourage patients to manage their health care and health information.