Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 3, 2020
Date Accepted: Jun 3, 2020
Identifying the causal effect of honorary titles for physicians on the changes in their service volumes in online healthcare communities
ABSTRACT
Background:
The platform management party of the online health community (OHC) provides an incentive policy (honorary title) to encourage the online involvement of the physicians, but it is still unclear whether the award of the honorary title has an impact on their consultation volume in OHC.
Objective:
This study aims to identify the different average changes in consultation volumes for each subgroup in OHC. We acquired the targeted samples based on treatment, namely physicians with the honorary title or not, and outcomes measured before and after the award within the same subgroup (not necessarily for the same individual).
Methods:
Regression discontinuity design (RDD) was applied to investigate the impact of the honorary title incentives (treatment) on OHC. There was a sharply discontinuous “treatment” (receiving the award) as an indicator of the physicians’ online health service performance. The experimental dataset consists of 346 physicians in the treated group (with horary title). Applying the propensity score matching method, the same size of physicians (346) was matched and selected as the control group.
Results:
A sharp discontinuity was found at the period of the physician receiving the honorary title. The results showed that the parametric estimates of the coefficient were significantly positively (p value<0.001) associated with monthly homepage views.
Conclusions:
Being named with the honorary title can significantly magnitude the monthly homepage views, yet didn’t impact on the monthly consultations significantly. Therefore, our findings provided empirical evidence for the claim that regression discontinuity existed at the cut-off of the period. Clinical Trial: Not clinical trials
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