Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 29, 2019
Date Accepted: Dec 21, 2019
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The Impact of Gifts from Patients on Physicians’ Service Quality in Online Consultation: From the Perspective of Gift Price
ABSTRACT
Background:
Gift-giving from patients to physicians, which is prohibited in traditional clinical settings in China, has been found in online health communities (OHCs). However, people debate on the validity of online gifts because physicians gain economic benefit from them. Should physicians receive online gifts in OHCs? Will physicians’ online consultation service quality be affected by gift price? These questions remain unexplored.
Objective:
This paper aims to explore the impact of gift price on the quality of physicians’ online consultation service. An insight into the impact will contribute to the settlement of the existing disputes.
Methods:
A dataset of 141 physicians and 4,249 physician-patient interactions is collected from the Good Physician Online Website, the largest online consultation platform in China. Based on the social exchange theory (SET), we investigate how gift price affects the quality of physicians’ online consultation service and how the impact changes with the physician’s service price and the number of all the gifts he/she got. Manual annotation is used to identify the information support paragraphs and emotional support paragraphs in the answers of physicians. And the quality of the information support paragraphs, instead of all the answer, is used to test the robustness of our model.
Results:
The gift price has a positive impact on the quality of physicians' online consultation service (β=4.941, p<0.01). The impact is negatively mediated by both physicians’ service price (β=-9.245, p<0.001) and the number of gift they got (β=-5.080, p<0.001).
Conclusions:
Gift price has a positive impact on physicians’ online behavior. And the impact is different for different physicians.
Citation
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