JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Online health consultation service is of great significance for improving medical service quality and improving doctor-patient relationship. Doctors in China regularly interact with their patients (or, at least, those who make inquiries) online rather than primarily in-person. The prosperity of the platform depends on the continuous participation and efforts of doctors, and obtaining satisfactory economic returns is an important motivation for doctors' continuous participation.

Objective:

This study is of guiding significance to platform service providers, doctors and patients in the OHCs.

Methods:

Doctor's participation behavior is a process in which professional capital participates in social exchange for economic return. Based on social exchange theory, this paper establishes an online effort exchange model for doctors. From March 5, 2019, the data of doctors treating five diseases of hepatitis B, diabetes, rhinitis, cervical spondylosis and lung cancer in Beijing were collected on the website of good doctor. The data collection lasted for 10 days, involving 253 doctors. We analyzed quantitative data by SPSS version 20 using descriptive and logistic regression analysis techniques.

Results:

Research shows that the number of doctors’ answers has a significant positive impact on income, and the number of topic groups is strongly affected by the degree of disease privacy. When the degree of disease privacy increases, the influence of the number of topic set by doctors on the income of online consultation turns from negative correlation to positive correlation, indicating that when patients consult diseases with low degree of privacy, the more topics, the lower the doctor income; while when patients consult diseases with high degree of privacy, the more topics, the higher the income.

Conclusions:

This study is of guiding significance to platform service providers, doctors and patients in the OHCs. The online health-care platform should provide more and better online doctor-patient interaction tools for showing doctors’ efforts through policy tilt and system design; for privacy diseases, doctors who devote more energy and time to topic group setting have more advantages and are more likely to get better incomes; patients who receive online health-care services can choose doctors who reply timely and carefully instead of pursuing doctors who have high status. Clinical Trial: none