JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In recent years, Physician Rating Websites (PRWs) have become increasingly important in the cross-section between health and digitalization. Despite the advancing level of digitalization, social influence plays a crucial role in human behavior, in many domains of life. So far, however, there has been little discussion about the role of social influence as antecedent of behavioral intention to use PRWs.

Objective:

This study aims to evaluate the impact of social influence on the behavioral intention to use PRWs.

Methods:

We conducted a cross-sectional online study using the crowdsourcing platform Clickworker. The impact of social influence on behavioral intention to use PRWs was investigated through linear regression, mediation- as well as moderated mediation analysis, calculated by means of the PROCESS macro in SPSS.

Results:

In total, we were able to include the responses of 518 survey participants in the analysis. Our results show that social influence has an impact on the behavioral intention to use PRWs. However, when calculating the proposed mediation model, it becomes clear that this impact can partly be explained through the two mediator variables credibility and performance expectancy. In contrast, neither demographic (age & gender) nor psychographic (eHealth literacy & review skepticism) variables have a significant moderating impact in the influencing chain.

Conclusions:

The study confirms that social influence has an impact on the behavioral intention to use PRWs. It was demonstrated, however, that this impact is exerted not just directly, but also indirectly through credibility and performance expectancy. According to the findings of this study, social influence has the potential to boost the use of PRWs. As a result, these online networks might be a promising future interface between healthcare and digitalization, allowing healthcare practitioners to gain a beneficial external impact while also learning from patient feedback. Social influence nowadays is not just limited to friends and the family, but can also be exerted by social media influencers (SMI) in the domain of PRW usage. Thus, from a marketing perspective, PRW providers could think of collaborating with SMI and our results could contribute to stimulating discussion in this vein.