Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 14, 2019
Date Accepted: Nov 11, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Will Doctors’ Online Reputation Affect Patients’ Experiences Sharing for Outpatient Care Service?
ABSTRACT
Background:
Reviews are important for consumers to make informed decisions in online communities and for organizations to predict sales in the future. Most existing literature are conducted in product fields, with little attention paid to healthcare. Whether patients prefer to use these new platforms to discuss the reputation of doctors has so far remained an open question.
Objective:
We investigate how patients’ propensity to post the treatment experiences (PPPTE) changes with doctors’ (individual) online reputation (medical quality and service attitude) for outpatient care service. We also investigate the moderating effects of hospital (organizational) online reputation and disease severity.
Methods:
The fractional logistic regression under the GLM framework based on data from 7,183 doctors within a Chinese online health community are used to get the empirical results.
Results:
Our results show that patients prefer to share their treatment experiences for doctors who have higher medical quality and service attitude and work in higher online reputation hospitals. Comparing with the doctors who treat less severe diseases, PPPTE is smaller for doctors who treat severe diseases. In addition, the hospital’s online reputation positively (negatively) moderates the relationship between medical quality (service attitude) and PPPTE. Further, the moderating effects of disease severity on the doctor’s online reputation are negative.
Conclusions:
Our research contributes to both theory and practice by researching the impact of individual reputation on consumer behavior, investigating the moderating effects of organizational reputation and consumer characteristics in healthcare.
Citation
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