Research On Patient Selection And Doctor Participation Behavior In Online Health Community

With the aging of population and the improvement of residents' health consciousness,the demand of residents for healthcare resources becomes increasingly pronounced.And the contradiction between the growing medical demand and the limited healthcare resources has become a hot issue of global concern.The medical problems in China are even more serious.China has entered a period of rapid population aging.At the same time,medical needs of residents are increasing rapidly.Besides,there are some problems,such as the shortage of healthcare investment and the unreasonable allocation of medical resources.The universal healthcare system is gradually sound and the residents of basic health services fairness and accessibility has been significantly improved through a number of medical and health system reform.Although the state is gradually increasing its investment in healthcare,implementing many reforms on the national health insurance system to improve the fairness and accessibility of residents' basic medical and health services,at present the problems of insufficiency,unreasonable structure and unbalanced distribution of medical resources are still severe.However,the online healthcare community offers new solutions to solve these problems.Online healthcare community can break through the limitation of geographical space,and broaden the channel of physician-patient communication.It is helpful to facilitate the sharing of medical resources,reduce the medical cost for patients and improve medical efficiency.In addition,online healthcare community as an emerging online platform,there are still some problems such as low user participation rate,biased medical information and so on.On the basis of reviewing and summarizing the existing literature,this paper defines the concepts and characteristics of online objective information and subjective information classification,empirically studies the influence of online healthcare information on the choice of patients' services using the online healthcare community data,and further explores the impact of patient's online service selection on physician's initiative for participation in online medical services.The specific categories are:(1)This paper examines the impact of online healthcare community information on patients' online consultation decisions.Based on behavioral decision theory,this paper constructs an empirical model to explore how two different kinds of information generated by patients and physicians respectively in online healthcare community affect patients' decision to consult the physician online.The empirical results show that online rating and activity of physician in online healthcare community have positive effects on the number of physician's patients.These positive effects have been negatively moderated by the hospital level and the physician's professional title.(2)This paper explores the impact of online healthcare community information on patients' decision-making of offline visit.From the perspective of decision makers(patients),this paper divides information on physician quality into subjective information and objective information,and studies the difference of two different kinds of information's influence on patients' decision making,as well as the interaction between the two forms of information.The results show that subjective and objective information on the quality of physician's services has a positive impact on patients' decision-making.However,compared with absence of objective information,presenting high level of objective information positively influences patients' decision-making,which shows that low level objective information has a negative effect on patients' decision-making.Moreover,when both the subjective information and the objective information of the physician indicate a high quality of physicians' services,the effect of them on the patient's decision-making can be substituted each other.But when objective information indicates that physicians' services are of low quality,patients tend to believe in subjective quality information other than objective one.(3)This paper explores the impact of patient's online service selection on the initiative of physician to participate in online services.From the perspective of decision makers(patients),the services of the online healthcare community are classified into online consultations,online to offline medical visits and offline to online consultations.This paper studies the impact of three different behaviors of patient's online selection on the initiative of physician to participate in online services,as well as the moderating impacts of physician's professional title on it.The results find that patients' selection towards online consultation services and offline referral services has a positive impact on the initiative of physicians to participate in online services.However,online to offline visit has no effect on the initiative of physicians to participate in online consultation,and the impact will be moderated by physicians' professional titles.