The Impact Of WOM Sources On Physicians’ Performance In Online Healthcare Community

The development of the online healthcare community has provided a new idea forsolving the problem of uneven distribution of medical resources and poor communication between physicians and patients.However,due to the serious information asymmetry in the online healthcare community,patients often face great uncertainty when making medical decisions,and physicians with high levels and high quality of service offline might not get high online performance.In order to promote the continuous development of the online healthcare community,many scholars have discussed the factors that can affect the physician’s online performance.Among them,the large amount of word-of-mouth source information accumulated by the patient feedback system is likely to affect doctors’ online performance.But few literatures have tested it..In e-commerce,the source of word-of-mouth has been considered as one of the important dimensions when studying the role of word of mouth.However,relevant research in the online healthcare is relatively scarce.Our research introduces the source of word-of-mouth into online healthcare,and studies the impact of the source of word-of-mouth feedback from patients on physicians’ online performance.We mainly studies the following questions: 1)Explore whether the strong-tie word of mouth,weak-tie word of mouth and professional word of mouth feedback from patients can affect the online performance of physicians;2)Separately study in the case of different reputation ratings,professional titles and the time of consultations,whether the source of word-of-mouth feedback from patients has a heterogeneous effect on doctors’ online performance.Combined with the information asymmetry,elaboration likehhood model(ELM)and other relevant theoretical foundations,this paper establishes a theoretical model and proposes research hypotheses.We collected panel data of infertility physicians on haodf.com.Then we established a multiple regression equation and used panel negative binomial regression for analysis.We also collected and analyzed data from lung cancer physicians to conduct disease sensitivity analysis.The results show that the strong-tie word-of-mouth and professional word-of-mouth from patient feedback has a significant impact on physicians’ online performance.In addition,the source of word-of-mouth feedback from patients can only improve the online performance of high-reputation physicians,and there is no significant impact on low-reputation physicians;for physicians with low professional titles,professional word-of-mouth has a greater impact on physicians ’online performance,and for physicians with higher professional titles,the strong-tie word-of-mouth and weak-tie word-of-mouth have a greater impact on online performance;Compared with physicians who launched online consultations later,the source of word of mouth feedback from patients has a greater impact on physicians who opened online consultations earlier.The research results reveal the impact of patient feedback on the online performance of physicians,and discuss the heterogeneity of the impact for physicians with different reputations,professional titles and the registration time.It has made up for the blank of research on the source of word of mouth in online healthcare field and has expanded the research on the source of word of mouth and word of mouth.In practice,it can provide targeted recommendations for online medical platform managers and physicians with different personal conditions to promote the win-win situation of physicians,patients and online medical platforms.