JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Online medical consultation, which has been adopted by patients in many countries, requires a large number of doctors to provide services. However, no study has provided an overall picture of the doctors who provide online services.

Objective:

This study sought to examine doctors’ participation in medical consultation practice in an online consultation platform. This paper aims at addressing the following questions: 1) Which doctors provide online consultation services? 2) How many patients do the doctors get online? 3) What price do they charge? We further explore the development of market segments in various departments and various provinces.

Methods:

This study explores the dataset including all doctors providing consultation services in their spare time on a Chinese online consultation platform – Haodf. We also brought in statistics for doctors' providing offline consultations in China. To examine the stated research questions, we make use of descriptive statistics and comparative analysis.

Results:

There are 88,308 doctors providing online consultation in their spare time on Haodf, accounting for 5.3% of all doctors in China on September 23, 2017. Of these online doctors, 49.9% are high-quality doctors having a title of Chief Physician or Associate Chief Physician, and 84.8% come from the top, Level 3, hospitals. Online doctors had an average workload of 0.38, with an online and offline ratio of 1:14. The average price of online consultation is 32.3 Yuan. The online ratios for the Cancer, Internal Medicine, Ophthalmology-Otorhinolaryngology, Psychiatry, Gynecology-Obstetrics-Pediatrics, Dermatology, Surgery and Traditional Chinese Medicine departments are 16.1%, 4.4%, 6.3%, 9.5%, 5.8%, 18.0%, 10.8% and 3.8%, respectively. The workloads for these departments are 0.18, 0.24, 0.47, 0.40, 0.60, 0.94, 0.31 and 0.36, respectively. The average quoted prices for online consultation in these departments are 33, 31, 40, 42, 35, 39, 33 and 23, respectively. Most provinces located in eastern China have more than 4000 doctors online. The online workloads for doctors from most provinces range from 0.3 to 0.4. In most provinces, doctors’ charges range from 20 to 30 Yuan.

Conclusions:

Quality doctors are more likely to provide online consultation services, get more patients and charge higher service fees in an online consultation platform. Policies and promotions could attract more doctors to provide online consultation. The online sub-market for the departments of Dermatology, Psychiatry and Gynecology-Obstetrics-Pediatrics developed better than other departments like Internal Medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine. The result could be a reference for policy making to improve the medical system both online and offline. Since all the data used for analysis were from one single website, the data might be biased and might not be a representative national sample of China.