JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Crowdsourcing mode promotes goals achieved by gaining solutions from public groups via the Internet and has gained extensive attention in both business and academia. As a new mode of sourcing, crowdsourcing has been proven to improve efficiency, quality, diversity, etc. However, little attention has been given to the health sector.

Objective:

The online crowdsourced medical service (OCMS) mode that patients post their questions into the question pool, which is accessible to all doctors and wait for answers. As the sustainable development of OCMS depends on doctors’ participation, we try to investigate the influence factors of doctors’ participation in providing OCMS from the elaboration likelihood perspective.

Methods:

1,524 questions with complete patient-doctor interaction processes were collected from an online health community in China to test all hypotheses. We divided doctors into the first answered doctors (FirAD) and following answered doctors (FolAD) based on the sequence of answers. All analyses were conducted using the ordinary least squares (OLS) method.

Results:

The results show that first, the ability of FirAD positively impacts the participation of FolAD (βoffline1=0.177, t=5.131, p<0.000; βoffline2=0.063, t=1.978, p<0.048; βonline=0.418, t=6.011, p<0.000) to give replies. Second, the reward that the patient offered for the best answer shows a positive effect on doctors’ participation (β=0.019, t=13.56, p<0.000). Third, the question’s complexity positively moderates the relationships between the ability of FirAD and the participation of FolAD (β=0.186, t=2.404, p<0.05), and mitigates the effect between the reward and the participation of FolAD (β=-0.003, t=-1.723, p<0.10).

Conclusions:

This study has both theoretical and practical contributions. OHC managers could build effective incentive mechanisms on encouraging the high-ability doctors’ participate and improve the questions’ reward.