The impact of doctor's efforts and reputation on the number of new patients in online health community / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of doctor and colleague's online efforts and reputation on the number of new patients,by analyzing the online data of haidaifu website in 2008—2016 based on panel negative binomial regression method. The doctors' degree of online effort includes the number of words and their timeliness of their reply. Online reputation includes material evaluation (i.e. gift amount) and non-material evaluation (i. e. thanks letter). Studies have shown that the efforts and reputations of doctors and their colleagues have a significant impact on the number of new patients,and colleagues also play a significant regulatory role. And competition and co-operative relationship also exist between doctors and colleagues.