Understanding Physicians’ Contributions On Online Healthcare Platforms And Its Relationship With Offline Medical Service

The rapid development of online medical platform offers new ways for physicians to provide medical services.Although more and more physicians have registered as members on online healthcare platforms,few of them actively make contributions on the platform.How to motivate physicians to actively participate in contribution on online healthcare platforms is an urgent problem.In addition,how the emergence of online healthcare platforms will affect the traditional offline medical service system is also the focus of academic and industry.Although scholars have explored the social value of online healthcare platforms from different perspectives,such as information acquisition,seeking social support,alleviating the health disparities between urban and rural areas,there are still some gaps.Based on similarity effect theory,feedback effect theory,egoism-altruism framework and hypothesis of economic man,this thesis explored physicians’ behavior on online healthcare platforms and its effects on the offline medical service through the empirical analysis from individual and aggregate perspectives.First,this thesis analyzed the characteristics of physicians’ contribution behavior on online healthcare platforms,and classfied them into passive contribution and active contribution based on different characteristics.Based on the similarity theory,combined with the characteristics of physicians,this thesis classfied similarity into surface level and deep level.This thesis used gender similarity and affiliation similarity to measure surface level similarity,while experiential similarity and specialty similarity to measure deep level similarity.According to feedback mechanisms of the online platform,feedback effect in this study includes online rewards and online reviews.Thus,this thesis constructed the regression model of physicians’ contribution behavior to analyze the data.The findings showed that gender similarity has a stronger influence on the two contribution behaviors than affiliation similarity;that the influence of empirical similarity on these two contributions is stronger than that of specialty similarity and that for passive contribution,the effect of online rewards is stronger than that of online reviews,while for active contribution,the effect of online reviews is stronger than that of online rewards.Second,this thesis analyzed physicians’ egoistic and altruistic behavior on online healthcare platforms based on the theoretical framework of egoism and altruism and hypothesis of economic man.In this thesis,we used social return and economic return to measure physicians’ egoistic behavior and use active altruism and passive altruism to measure physicians’ altruistic behavior.Based on the priorstudy on online service quality,this thesis used response time,response content and response matching to measure physicians’ service qualtiy on online healthcare platforms and constructed the regression model of physicians’ service qualtiy on online healthcare platforms to analyze the data.The results showed that egoistic behavior and active altruism behavior could positively promote physicians’ online service qualtiy.Third,this thesis constructed physicians’ online and offline behavior ecosystem systems.Based on the system,this thesis used structural vector autoregression model to analyze the data and used the impulse response functions to analyze the dynamic relationship between physicians’ online and offline behavior.The findings showed that the increase of passive contribution and active contribution will lead to more subsequent outpatient services;that the increase of the number of outpatients will lead to the decrease of the number of passive contributions and that the increase of the number of outpatients will lead to the increase of active contributions in the subsequent period.