Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Sep 9, 2019
Date Accepted: Oct 14, 2019
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
How Online Reviews and Services Affect Physician’s Outpatient Care Demands: Evidence from Two Online Healthcare Communities
ABSTRACT
Background:
Online healthcare communities are changing the ways of physician-patient communication and how patients choose outpatient care physicians. Although a majority of empirical work have examined the role of online reviews in consumer decision. However, a) less evidences have been found in healthcare and b) endogeneity of online reviews has not been fully considered. Moreover, the important factor-physician online service, has been neglected in patient decision.
Objective:
In this paper, we try to address the endogeneity of online reviews and examine the impact of online reviews and services on outpatient care demands.
Methods:
We use a “difference-in-difference” approach to account for physician- and website-specific effects.
Results:
By collecting 474 physician information from two online healthcare communities, we find that the number of reviews works more effective in patient decision comparing with the overall review rating. An improvement in reviews leads to a relative increase in physician outpatient care demands at that website. There are channel effects in healthcare: online services complement offline service (outpatient care appointment service). Results further indicate that online services moderate the relationships between online reviews and physician outpatient service demands.
Conclusions:
Our findings provide a basis research on online healthcare communities.
Citation
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