Exploring The Influence Of Patients’ Gift Giving On Consultation Service Quality In Online Consultation Process

[Purpose] Along with the booming development of Internet healthcare and increase of people’s medical demand,the functions and settings of online health communities are increasingly improved.Online medical consultation is an important service mode in them.In recent years,some online health communities have launched online gifts to improve physician-patient communication and relationships and patients can send online gifts of their own accord to physicians by buying them.The effects of online gifts on physician-patient interactions are related to the establishment of physician-patient relationships and the development of online health communities,but few people have paid attention to them.Besides,service quality is the core competitiveness of service providers and an important influencing factor of customers’ satisfaction and loyalty.So,this paper explores the impact of patients’ gift giving on consultation service quality and reveals the role of gifts in online physician-patient interactions.Besides,the influencing mechanism of gift price,gift type and tie strength are also explored.[Methods] Firstly,based on the theories and studies about gift giving,this paper constructs a effect model to investigate the impact of patients’ gift giving on consultation service quality.Then,a Python program is developed to scrape physicians’ personal information and physician-patient interaction data from Haodf.com,and 267 physicians and 14,187 physician-patient interactions are obtained.Finally,this paper uses manually annotation,data mining,and cross-sectional data analysis to explore the impact of gift giving,gift price,gift types on consultation service quality and verify the moderating effect of tie strength among which.[Results] The empirical results show that physicians will improve their service quality when they received online gifts from patients(β=0.637,P<0.001),and the higher the gift price,the greater the increase of consultation service quality(β=0.002,P<0.01).Besides,comparing to instrumental gifts,affective gifts can better improve consultation service quality(β=-0.058,P<0.01).At last,this paper explores the moderating effect of tie strength and the results show that the stronger the tie strength between physicians and patients,the smaller the impact of gift price on consultation service quality(β=-0.001,P<0.1).And the difference between impacts of instrumental and affective gifts on consultation service quality will be narrowed when physician-patient tie strength get stronger(β=0.012,P<0.001).[Conclusions] This paper reveals the role of gifts in online health communities from gift giving,gift price,gift types and tie strength between physicians and patients using empirical analysis.The research conclusions of this paper not only have important theoretical significance,but also provide references for the management practice of medical institutions,health administrative departments and online medical platforms.