JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Online health communities (OHCs) can alleviate the uneven distribution and utilization of medical resources and severe hospital congestion. Patients tend to seek health information through OHCs before or after visiting physicians, which may affect their cognition, health literacy, decision-making preference, and behaviors. Social factors (social support, social presence, and responsiveness) are closely related to patient health-related behaviors and health outcomes.

Objective:

This study aims to explore effects of patients' health information seeking behavior (way and effectiveness) in OHCs on their compliance from the perspectives of patients’ perceived social support, social presence, and responsiveness.

Methods:

This study established a research model from the perspective of social information processing, by employing social exchange theory. An anonymous questionnaire survey was conducted through several Chinese OHCs to collect data. Confirmatory factor analysis, and partial least squares and structural equation modelling were adopted to test hypotheses and develop research model.

Results:

Out of 403 responses received, and 332 were valid. The reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity were acceptable. Results indicated that both way and effectiveness of patients seeking health information through OHCs have positive effects on their compliance through the mediations of their perceived social support, social presence and responsiveness from OHCs and other users, and patient compliance can be improved by guiding patients’ health information seeking behavior in OHCs from the social perspective.

Conclusions:

Findings suggest that: (1) patients should enrich their ways to seek health information through OHCs; (2) physicians can help their patients develop abilities to seek health information, and provide patients with social support—informational and emotional support—through OHCs; (3) OHCs can provide users with detailed guidelines, such as different ways of seeking health information, strengthen the management of information quality, adopt several interactional tools and incentives to encourage users to participate in OHCs’ activities, and develop recommendation algorithms to automatically recommend health information for users according to their information seeking history and preference.