Research On Influencing Factors Of Patients’ Intention To Share Medical Information In Online Healthcare Communities

The lack and uneven distribution of medical resources is a major problem faced by the medical and health services in China. To some degree, online healthcare community alleviates this problem by providing a new way to acquire and share medical information for people. Patients’ sharing of medical information voluntarily is one of the main sources of medical information resources, and is also the foundation and guarantee for online healthcare community. However, how to promote patient’s medical information sharing troubles many service providers of online healthcare community. At the same time, most of domestic researches on information sharing focus on personal information in common network environment. But researches on medical information sharing in online healthcare community are very few. So exploration of patients’ medical information sharing in online healthcare community has important theoretical and realistic significance.From the perspective of patients’ perception, this paper studies influencing factors of patients’ intention to share medical information in online healthcare community. A theoretical model is set up to describe the influencing factors based on the theory of planned behavior integrating with the theory of privacy, health belief model and information intermediary. In the view of the particularity of online healthcare community, the model uses social rewards to replace the original subjective norms of TPB model, in order to describe social pressure better. And disease severity, information sensitivity and pior positive experience are induced to be influencing factors of patients’ intention to share medical information. In the theoretical model, this variables are antecedents. Attitude, perceived behavior control and social rewards are intermediate variables. Intention to share medical information is the dependent variable. Considering the influence of disease patterns, chronic diseases are set to be the moderator variable of the model. Then this paper raises many hypotheses according to the model. To validate these hypotheses, sample datas are collected by questionnaires and the structural equation model is used.In this paper, the research results show that patients’ intention to share medical information depends on the patient’s attitude and perceived behavior control toward the behavior and awareness of social rewards bringed by online healthcare community. Whereas prior positive experience positively influences attitude, perceived behavior control and social rewards, disease severity can positively influence attitude. Thus they indirectly affect patients’ willingness to share medical information. But patients’ perception of medical information sensitivity does not effect his sharing behavior. In addition, this paper also finds out that chronic diseases play an negative regulatory role in the relationship of social rewards and intention to share medical information.