Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 8, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 13, 2018 - Oct 18, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 7, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Investigating the Effect of Paid and Free Feedback About Physicians' Telemedicine Services on Patients’ and Physicians’ Behaviors: Panel Data Analysis
Background:
In recent years, paid online patient-physician interaction has been incorporated into the telemedicine markets. With the development of telemedicine and telemedicine services, online feedback has been widely applied, helping other patients to identify quality services. Recently, in China, a new type of service feedback has been applied to the telemedicine markets, namely, paid feedback. Patients who are satisfied with a physician’s online service can buy a virtual gift or give a tip to the physicians. This paid feedback can improve the reliability of service feedback and reduce the proportion of false information because it increases the cost for feedback providers. Paid online feedback can benefit the physicians, such as by providing them with monetary incentives; however, research on the impacts and value of such paid feedback from the physician perspective in the telemedicine markets is scant. To fill this research gap, this study was designed to understand the role of paid feedback by developing a research model based on the theories of signaling and self-determination.
Objective:
This study aimed to explore the effects of free and paid feedback on patients’ choice and physicians’ behaviors as well as to investigate the substitute relationship between these 2 types of feedback in the telemedicine markets.
Methods:
A JAVA software program was used to collect online patient-doctor interaction data over a 6-month period from a popular telemedicine market in China (Good Physician Online). This study drew on a 2-equation panel model to test the hypotheses. Both fixed and random effect models were used to estimate the combined effects of paid feedback and free feedback on patients’ choice and physicians’ contribution. Finally, the Hausman test was adopted to investigate which model is better to explain our empirical results.
Results:
The results of this study show that paid feedback has a stronger effect on patients’ choice (a5=0.566; t2192 =9.160; P<.001) and physicians’ contribution (β4=1.332; t2193 =11.067; P<.001) in telemedicine markets than free feedback. Moreover, our research also proves that paid feedback and free feedback have a substitute relationship in determining patients’ and physicians’ behaviors (a6=−0.304; t2191 =−5.805; P<.001 and β5=−0.823; t2192 =−8.136; P<.001).
Conclusions:
Our findings contribute to the extant literature on service feedback in the telemedicine markets and provide insight for relevant stakeholders into how to design an effective feedback mechanism to improve patients’ service experience and physicians’ engagement.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.