ABSTRACT
As an indispensable part of contemporary medical services, Internet-based medical platforms can provide patients with a full range of multi-disciplinary and multi-modal treatment services. Along with the emergence of many healthcare influencers and the increasing connection between online and offline consultations, the operation of individual physicians and their teams on Internet-based medical platforms has started to attract a lot of attention. The purpose of this paper is to, based on an Internet platform, study how the information on physicians' homepages influences patients' consultation behavior, so as to provide suggestions for the construction of physicians' personal websites. We distinguish variables into strong- and weak-ties types, dependent on whether deep social interactions between physicians and patients have happened. If there exist further social interactions, we define the variable as the "strong ties" type, otherwise, "weak ties". The patients' consultation behavior will be expressed as the volume of online consultation, i.e., the number of patients. We obtained the strong and weak ties information of each physician based on EWM (entropy weight method), so as to establish a regression model with explained variable, i.e., the number of patients, and three explanatory variables, i.e., the strong and weak ties information, and their interaction term. The estimation results verified our hypotheses and proved to be robust. It showed that both strong and weak ties information can positively influence patients' consultation behavior, and the influence of weak ties information is greater. Regarding the positive influence of strong and weak ties, we found a trade off effect between them. Based on the results, we finalize with some suggestions on how to improve a physician's online medical consultation volume.
ABSTRACT
The medical service is a special credit commodity, and trust plays a very important role in patients' online medical choice behavior. By collecting information about the doctors on China's leading online medical platform (Platform A), a regression analysis model was constructed, based on the credibility theory model, which has the following three dimensions: ability trust, benevolence trust, and integrity trust. The results showed that the medical title of the doctors, their department's reputation, the number of gifts given to them, and the number of patients who registered with them after diagnosis, among other factors, had a significant, positive impact on the behavior of choosing doctors. Among these considerations, the number of patients registered after diagnosis had the greatest impact on the behavior of choosing doctors. This factor is the result of each doctor's personal brand management, which reflects their comprehensive ability, reputation and integrity. Compared with previous studies, this paper creatively analyzed the important influence of departmental reputation and the number of patients registered after diagnosis on medical choice behavior and puts forward that a doctor can use the number of patients registered after diagnosis to manage their personal brand. Based on the results of this study, we will also put forward suggestions from the perspectives of patients, doctors and the online medical community.
