Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 22, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 19, 2024 - Nov 14, 2024
Date Accepted: Feb 14, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Association among Online Health Information Seeking (OHIS), Online Health Information Perception (OHIP), and Health Service Utilization: A Cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Online health information seeking (OHIS) can empower individuals to better understand health concerns, facilitating improved health conditions management. OHIS has the potential to change the likelihood and the frequency of health services usages. Although the existing literatures have demonstrated the OHIS prevalence among different population and patients, the factors on the online health information perception (OHIP), discussion on the associations between OHIS and health services is paucity.
Objective:
To completely understand the association between OHIS and health services utilization, and the delivery mechanism of OHIP.
Methods:
This study analyzed data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). Independent variable in our analysis is the OHIS behavior. In our analysis, the explained variable was respondents’ health service utilization. Respondents’ OHIP were chosen as the mediating variables in our analysis. Factor analysis was carried out to extract OHIP. Multiple regressions were performed to examine the effect of OHIS to physician visits. Bootstrap methods were conducted for the mediation effects testing of OHIP.
Results:
A total of 1475 cases were selected from the database for the analysis. Among the participants, 939(63.66%) had OHIS in the last 12 months. After controlling other variables, those with OHIS behaviors increased 30.7% outpatient visits (P=0.001), 14.2% TCM outpatient visits (P=0.005) and 16.4% Western physician visits (P=0.002) in the past year compared to those without OHIS. The mediation effects analysis results showed that OHIP had a significant promotion on physician visits by increasing the OHIS behaviors (β=0.263, P<0.01).
Conclusions:
Individual’s OHIP has an impact on the effect of OHIS on the frequency of physician visits. OHIS behavior affects outpatient service utilization both directly and indirectly via the OHIP. OHIS behaviors significantly increase the utilization of clinic visits after controlling for other variables. Interventions can be explored to improve residents’ health utilization through improving their OHIP.
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