JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Medical crowdfunding provides opportunities for individuals who lack financial resources to access to health services they need. Despite the popularity of medical crowdfunding, the current understanding of the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns is fragmented and not adequate. A comprehensive review of the success factors of medical crowdfunding is in urgent need.

Objective:

This systematic review aims to provide a comprehensive investigation into the factors leading to the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns.

Methods:

A search was conducted in PubMed, PsycINFO, Web of Science, ACM Digital Library, and ScienceDirect from 2010 to June 2020. Papers directly and indirectly related to the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns were included. Two reviewers independently extracted information on the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns.

Results:

Our search yielded 441 articles, of which 13 met the inclusion criteria. After analyzing these articles, it was found that: (1) Most studies leverage text analysis as their research methods; (2) Medical crowdfunding is increasingly attracting academic attention; (3) There is a lack of consensus on the definition of medical crowdfunding amongst researchers; (4) Four categories of factors that affect the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns are identified: (a) platforms which include factors relate to medical crowdfunding platforms; (b) raisers which include factors relate to the raisers of medical crowdfunding campaigns; (c) donors which include factors relate to the raisers of medical crowdfunding campaigns; (d) campaigns which include factors relate to medical crowdfunding campaigns themselves.

Conclusions:

Since there’s no robust synthesis of the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns, it is necessary to conduct this systematic review. Although some limitations exist in our systematic review like more literatures could be included, more categories could be explored, bias and heterogeneity may still exist in the process of review, our study captures the research status of the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns systematically. Overall, our study provides a comprehensive mapping of the research of success of medical crowdfunding campaigns and could be the basis for the future research of this topic.