Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 23, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: May 23, 2020 - Jun 12, 2020
Date Accepted: Jun 25, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
How to Convert Visitors of Physician’s Personal Website to Customers in Online Health Communities: A Longitudinal Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the dramatic development of Web 2.0, an increasing number of patients and physicians are actively involved in online health communities (OHCs). Although many researchers have examined OHCs, the conversion rate of OHCs and its driving factors has not been discussed.
Objective:
This study analyzes the conversion rate of OHCs and explores the effects of multi-source OHC information: physician-generated information, patient-generated information and system-generated information.
Methods:
An empirical research is conducted to examine the effects of physician-generated, patient-generated and system-generated information on the conversion rate of physician’s personal website by analyzing short panel data from 2,112 physicians over five time periods in a Chinese OHC.
Results:
The results indicate that multi-source OHC information: physician-generated, patient-generated and system-generated information positively affect the conversion rate. And physician-generated and patient-generated information have a substitute relationship rather than a complementary relationship. In addition, the usage time of personal website can positively moderate patient-generated information, but can negatively moderate physician-generated information.
Conclusions:
This study contributes to e-health literature by investigating the conversion rate of OHCs and the effect of multi-source OHC information. This study also contributes to understand the drivers of conversion rate on service websites and successfully improve the efficiency of OHCs.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.