Optimal information disclosure strategy in the primary healthcare service market: From the perspective of signaling theory.

The promotion of general practitioner (GP) contract service is one of the key components of China's healthcare reform. We consider GPs providing primary health services with private competency information over two periods, where patients decide when to sign. Two types of GPs are considered: those with higher and lower competency. Under asymmetric information, to spur the patients' incentive to sign, the GPs can move to offer competency disclosure schemes to patients, for example, separating or pooling, through which true competency information is revealed, respectively. We investigate three scenarios, which are referred to as "separating-separating," "pooling-separating," and "pooling-pooling." The results of the three scenarios yield intriguing insights into the impact of the GP's competency disclosure decisions. Findings include that GPs prefer the "pooling-separating" strategy, but patients prefer "separating-separating." Besides, an extremely low cure rate may enable GPs to conceal some competency information. Furthermore, low-competency GPs may exaggerate their competency level for profit, but greater efforts in disclosing competency information may result in diminished benefits. Therefore, to promote the services of GPs, the core is always to improve GPs' competency.

Exploring the Nexus of Healthcare Employees' Professional Quality, Health Psychology and Service Value: A Qualitative Study.

While the implementation of the "graded diagnosis and treatment" system highlights the important role of general practitioners as "residents' health gatekeepers", it brings the problem of insufficient service capacity and difficulty in realizing the service value. At present, the service value of general practitioners is a relatively new topic in the field of general medicine. Therefore, few studies discuss the specific path that affects the realization of their service value. According to literature analysis, the professional quality of general practitioners plays a positive role in improving their service quality. So it can be inferred that the main reason for this phenomenon is that the professional quality level of general practitioners as the service subject is low and they have not been trusted and recognized by the residents of the service object. So far, it is difficult for most residents to change their willingness to go to large hospitals. Training is the most critical link to improving the professional quality of general practitioners. Therefore, how to enhance the professional quality of general practitioners through effective training so as to realize the service value is a problem worth discussing. Our study took 37 general practitioners from 12 Community Health Service hospitals as the interviewees and used grounded theory to mine the internal correlation between variables. The results show that: (1) the professional quality of general practitioners mainly includes three dimensions: professional ethics, theoretical knowledge, and professional skills; (2) through training, the professional quality of general practitioners has been effectively improved; (3) the improvement of general practitioners' professional quality directly affects the realization of their technical value, environmental value and information value; (4) the professional quality of general practitioners can be improved through training, which will affect the realization of their service value. Our research contribution is to break through the previous research paradigm of analyzing the relationship between variables based on the existing literature. This paper uses the procedural grounded theory method to analyze the concept of general practitioners' professional quality from scratch through continuous refinement and summary and constructs a theoretical model of the training path from general practitioners' professional quality to service value. On the one hand, the research results can realize their service value by improving the professional quality of general practitioners. On the other hand, the realization of the service value of general practitioners can provide effective support for patients to create a good medical environment.

Influential Pathways of Employees' Career Growth: Linkage of Psychological and Organizational Factors Based on Qualitative Comparative Analysis.

Implementing the "hierarchical diagnosis and treatment" system highlights the important role of general practitioners as "residents' health gatekeepers." Still, the low level of career growth always limits the realization of their service value. Inertial thinking uses a single factor to explain the complexity of career growth in previous studies; in fact, it isn't easy to assess whether the factor is a sufficient and necessary condition for a high level of career growth. Herein, we have used a set theory perspective to analyze the mechanism of influencing high-level career growth by combining psychological and organizational factors. This research aims to analyze causal complexity relationship between these conditions and results is analyzed in detail. We choose fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) with a sample of 407 GPs to test 5 antecedent conditional variables that can affect their career growth. The variables include professional identity, self-efficacy, achievement motivation, training mechanism, and incentive mechanism. To ensure the universality and diversity of data, the samples were selected from community medical institutions in different regions of China. The results show that three pathways can affect the high career growth of GPs, and the optimal pathway A2 is the linkage matching of high incentive mechanism, high professional identity, high achievement motivation, and high self-efficacy. At the same time, we find that professional identity plays an alternative role in the three pathways. When professional identity is at a high level, as long as achievement motivation and self-efficacy are superior, or achievement motivation, self-efficacy, and achievement motivation are superior, a high level of career growth can be achieved. We broke the shackles of previous studies that only focused on the impact of single factors on the career growth of GPs. From the perspective of set theory, we use configurational thinking to construct Influential pathways of high career growth of GPs by integrating antecedents. The results can provide effective support for improving GPs' service ability and realizing their service value to protect residents' health.