JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In recent years, paid online patient-physician interaction has been incorporated into the telemedicine markets, which enables patients to access physicians’ feedback through the Internet. Providing online feedback may also benefit the physicians besides monetary incentives, however, research on the impacts and value of such paid feedback from the physician perspective in the telemedicine markets is scant.

Objective:

To fill this research gap, this paper is designed to understand the role of paid feedback by developing a research model based on the theories of signaling and self-determination to explore the effects of free and paid feedback on patients’ choice and physicians’ behaviors, as well as investigating the substitute relationship between the two aforementioned of feedback in the telemedicine markets.

Methods:

A JAVA software program was used to collect online patient-doctor interaction data over a six-month period from a popular telemedicine market in China (Good Physician online). This paper drew on a two-equation panel model to test our research hypotheses. Both fixed and random effects models were used to estimate the effects of paid feedback and free feedback on patients’ choice and physicians’ contribution, respectively. Finally, the Hausman test was adopted to investigate which model is better to explain our empirical results.

Results:

The results of this paper show that paid feedback has a stronger effect on patients’ choice and physicians’ contribution in telemedicine markets compared with free feedback. Moreover, our research also proves that paid feedback and free feedback have a substitute relationship in determining patients’ and physicians’ behaviors.

Conclusions:

Firstly, it investigated the influence of paid feedback in telemedicine markets for the first time. Secondly, it combined the researched perspectives of both patients and physicians to comprehensively understand the role of online feedback in the telemedicine markets. Thirdly, it distinguished the relative strengths of the two types of service feedback, i.e., paid feedback has a stronger effect on patients’ choice and physicians’ contribution than free feedback. Finally, paid feedback and free feedback have a substitute relationship in patients’ and physicians’ behaviors. Furthermore, this paper also points out important practical strategies for marketers and developers of telemedicine markets. Firstly, how to incentivize physicians to contribute in the telemedicine markets is an important issue for designers because physicians are one of the most important resources for the development of the telemedicine markets. Developers should promote the role of paid feedback and improve reputational and monetary rewards to improve physicians’ contribution in the telemedicine markets. Secondly, although paid feedback could influence patients’ opinion on physicians’ service quality and help their decision-making process, such feedback would increase the monetary cost of providers and decrease the supply of paid feedback. Hence, developers of telemedicine platforms should design an effective compensation mechanism to reduce the cost of providers. For example, telemedicine platforms can provide some coupons for providers of paid feedback.