Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 13, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 25, 2020
Privacy Protection in Online Health Communities: A Bilateral Switch of Professional Healthcare Knowledge Sharing
ABSTRACT
Background:
An online health community (OHC) is a novel sharing channel through which doctors share professional healthcare knowledge with patients. While doctors have the authority to protect their patients’ privacy in OHCs, we have limited information on how doctors’ privacy-protection choices affect their professional healthcare knowledge sharing (PHKS) with patients.
Objective:
We examine the relationship between privacy protection and PHKS in OHCs. Specifically, we examine the effects of privacy protection settings in an OHC on doctors’ interactive PHKS and searching PHKS (two dimensions of PHKS). Moreover, we explore how such effects differ across different levels of disease stigma.
Methods:
To answer these questions, we obtained 631,529 online consultations of 19,456 physicians from one of the biggest online health community in Asian from January 2008 to April 2016. The variables include Physician ID, the number of online consultations with/without privacy protection settings, the total number of visits, the number of patients, the number of articles, the number of gifts, the number of follow up visits, and the title of a physician.
Results:
The privacy protection setting has a significant positive effect on interactive PHKS (β_1=0.0196,p<0.001). However, regarding the searching PHKS, we observed a significant negative effect of the privacy protection setting on doctors’ searching PHK (β_1=-0.03,p<0.001). High disease stigma positively impacts the effect of privacy protection on the interactive PHKS (coefficients are in the same valence), while negatively impacting the effects of privacy protection on the searching PHKS (coefficients are in the opposite valence).
Conclusions:
The results show that privacy protection has a bilateral effect on PHKS, i.e., a positive effect on interactive PHKS and a negative effect on searching PHKS. Such bilateral switches of PHKS call for a balanced state in conjunction with practical implications.
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