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:

A medical service based on paid crowdsourcing (MSPC) that patients post their questions openly and wait for doctors’ answers has been widely used. The sustainable development of MSPC depends on doctors’ participation, and we try to investigate the impact factors of doctors’ participation from the elaboration likelihood perspective.

Methods:

1,524 questions that contain the complete patient-doctor consultation process were collected from a medical question-and-answer (MQ&A) site in China to test our hypotheses. All analyses were conducted using the ordinary least squares (OLS) method.

Results:

The results show that first, the ability of the first doctor to answer the question positively impacts the following doctors’ participation (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). 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 first answered doctor’s online ability and the following doctors’ participation (β=0.186, t=2.404, p<0.05), and mitigates the effect between the reward and the following doctor's participation (β=-0.003, t=-1.723, p<0.10).

Conclusions:

Our study has both theoretical contributions and practical inspiration. Managers of MQ&A sites should build effective incentive mechanisms to improve the high-ability doctors’ participation and questions’ reward.