| With the gradual rise of Web 3.0 technology and the popularity of smart terminals,the online medical industry is growing rapidly.Doctors can use online medical platforms to provide medical services to patients online,gaining financial and social rewards and enhancing their professionalism and visibility.In order to help doctors better use online healthcare to obtain more economic and social rewards,and to give full play to the role of online healthcare in optimising the allocation of healthcare resources,it is necessary to study the factors influencing the volume of doctors’ online and offline consultations.Therefore,this study takes the study of factors influencing doctors’ online and offline consultation volume in the online healthcare context as its theme,and selects the study of factors influencing doctors’ online consultation volume as research question one and the study of factors influencing doctors’ offline consultation volume as research question two.First,to address research question one,this study used the heuristic-systematic model of dual process theory to obtain basic information about doctors and online consultation data from the "Good Doctor" online medical platform,to establish a model of factors influencing doctors’ online consultation volume,and to investigate the effect of each factor on doctors’ online consultation volume.The results of the empirical analysis showed that the recommendation popularity,satisfaction with the demonstrated efficacy,doctor’s personal information disclosure,doctor’s professionalism,doctor’s appointment booking service,the number of post-visit reviews published by patients,the number of articles and the response level all had significant effects on doctors’ online consultation volume.In addition,this study analysed the heterogeneous role of disease type in the influence of each systemic cue on the volume of online consultations with doctors.Secondly,to address research question 2,this study developed a quasiexperimental design based on signalling theory by matching online data obtained from the "Good Doctor Online" medical platform with the offline registration data collected from doctors,to develop a model of the factors influencing doctors’ offline consultations.A double difference method was used to estimate the effect of doctors’ presence on the online medical platform on doctors’ offline consultations,and the propensity score matching method was used to match the treatment group with the experimental group in the quasi-experiment to eliminate the endogeneity problem caused by self-selection bias.The empirical results show that physician presence in online healthcare has a significant positive effect on the volume of offline physician consultations.On this basis,two variables,doctor’s degree of specialisation and disease type,were introduced to explore their heterogeneous role in the effect of doctor’s presence on online healthcare platforms on doctors’ offline consultations.Finally,robustness tests were conducted to verify the robustness of the model and the empirical results.The model of influencing factors on doctors’ consultation volume constructed in this study enriches the research in the field of online healthcare and reveals the influence of each influencing factor on doctors’ consultation volume in the online healthcare context,with strong theoretical contributions.The results of the study have implications for the development of the online healthcare industry,the construction of online healthcare platforms and the use of online platforms by doctors.The platforms can make corresponding improvements to themselves according to the influence of each influencing factor on doctors’ consultation volume,helping doctors to increase their consultation volume both online and offline and playing an important role in online healthcare. |
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