Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 5, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 19, 2020
The Consequences of Gift Giving in Online Health Communities: From the Physicians’ Service Quality Perspective
ABSTRACT
Background:
Gift giving, which has been much debated in healthcare for years, is considered as a way of expressing gratitude and beneficial for the physician-patient relationship within a reasonable range. However, not much work has been done to examine the influence of gift giving on physicians’ service quality, especially in the online healthcare environment.
Objective:
This study will research the consequences of gift giving by mining and analyzing the dynamic physician-patient interaction processes online health communities (OHCs). Specifically, gift types (affective/instrumental) based on the motivations and physician-patient tie strength have been carefully considered to account for differences in physicians’ service quality.
Methods:
The dynamic interaction processes (involving 3,154 gifts) between 267 physicians and 14,187 patients from a famous OHC – haodf.com in China are collected obtain our empirical results.
Results:
Our results reveal that patients’ gift giving inspire physicians to improve their service quality that measured by physicians’ reply detail degree and bedside manner, and the influences vary with physician-patient tie strength. Moreover, affective gifts and instrumental gifts work differently in improving physicians’ service quality online.
Conclusions:
This paper is among the first to explore gift giving in OHCs and has both important theoretical and practical contributions. All of our conclusions and suggestions show that gift giving online is of great significance to promoting physician-patient effective communication and conducive to the relief of physician-patient conflicts.
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Copyright
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