Exploring The Factors Of Patient Chosing Physician Behavior In Online Health Communities

[Purpose] Medical and health resources are unevenly distributed between regions and medical resources are difficult to obtain.In order to solve this problem and fullfill people’s needs for health life,online health communities emerged.Patients can seek medical consultation through online health communities to obtain high-quality medical services to meet their own health needs.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore the factors of patients’ online doctors choice behavior,which can help doctors better maintain their own online information,and can also help online health platform managers to make proper decisions to keep the platform running well,thus patient could consistently get high-quality online medical serive.[Methods] This research starts from the perspectives of doctors’ electric Word-of-Mouth and service prices.We used 2794 copies of information from doctor’s homepage for empirical analysis,and used multiple linear regression to perform regression analysis on the model and explores the impact of online health community patients’ choice of physician.We also examined the moderating effect of disease risk on service prices and electric word-of-mouth on patient choice.[Results] After empirical research on the choice of doctors of patients in the online health community,we found that doctors’ electric word-of-mouth has a significant positive effect on the increment of doctors’ consultations(β=0.796,p<0.01),electric word-of-mouth has a significant negative effect(β =-0.448,p <0.01)on increment of doctors’ appointments,and the doctor’s service price has a positive effect on the increment of doctor’s consultation(β = 0.199,p <0.01),the service price has an positive effect on the increment of doctor’s appointment(β = 0.466,p <0.01);this study also found that disease risk has a positive moderating effect between the price of services and the increment of doctor consultations.For the regression models where the increment of consultation volume and the increment of reservation volume are dependent variables,the R-squared values are 0.171 and 0.213,respectively,indicating that the model fits well.The robustness test results are basically consistent with the regression results(R-squared are 0.171 and 0.100,respectively),indicating that the model is robust.[Conclusions] This study found that doctors’ online rating scores and doctors’ service prices are significant factors influencing patients’ doctor choice behavior.Specifically,we found that rating scores and service prices will positively affect the increase in doctors’ consultations,and service prices will also positively affect the increase in appointments.At the same time,the patient’s own disease risk will have a moderating effect on the relationship between the services price and the increase in the number of consultations and the increase of appointments.