| In recent years,doctor-patient disputes caused by inadequate and low efficiency communication have been aggravating,and even evolved into appalling criminal cases.The Online Healthcare Communities(OHCs)based on information technology provide an opportunity to alleviate doctor-patient contradictions,and create a good doctor-patient relationship by means of facilitating doctor-patient communication.Since doctor-patient communication is the main business and core function of the OHCs,effective doctor-patient communication is the most important criterion for measuring the quality of online doctors’ services.Shared Understanding is the central of doctor-patient communication and thus can stimulate patients’ reward behaviors through improving the patient’s perceived service quality and patient satisfaction.Thus,a cycle of good doctor-patient interaction is formed.However,there are scant researches having an insight into how to identify doctor-patient shared understanding in OHCs.Additionally,it is not clear that what influences of doctor-patient communication exerts on patient reward behaviors.Learning about the above issues is of great significance for shedding an insight into the status quo of doctor-patient communication and maintaining productive doctor-patient relationship in OHCs.With the popularization of the OHCs,a large amount of user-generated data is increasingly accumulating with more and more doctors and patients being involved into OHCs.In particular,doctor-patient communication textual data which serves as a carrier for information exchanging between doctors and patients is helpful to identify online doctor-patient shared understanding,directly,objectively and accurately.Due to the difficulties in collecting and processing of doctor-patient communication textual data,little researches have taken advantage of it to evaluate doctor-patient communication.The advent of web crawler and text mining technologies has provided an opportunity for researchers to utilize these textual data to explore doctor-patient communication in OHCs.In our study,we used web crawler technology to collect data from Haodf.com.Furtherly,we took advantage of text mining technology to analysis doctor-patient communication textual data,and adopted empirical econometric method to explore the antecedents and effects of doctor-patient communication.Our research obtained 54160 items of doctor-patient communication textual data,including 7,216 non-repeating doctors,as well as doctors’ personal attribute data and patient reward behavior data.Based on these data,we have finished the following tasks: Firstly,based on the perspective ofdoctor-patient shared understanding,we utilized LDA topic model and cosine similarity method to calculate the text similarity between doctor and patient communication text,and then discussed the results and assessed the status quo of online doctor-patient communication.Next,based on the results of effective doctor-patient communication,we took the depth of doctor-patient communication and patient communication,doctor gender,title,and city as independent variables,and the results of doctor-patient communication as dependent variable to construct an econometric empirical model to explore the antecedents of doctor-patient shared understanding.Finally,based on the social exchange theory,we probed into the influence of the depth of doctors’ communication and the doctor-patient shared understanding on the patient return behavior.At the same time,it was explored whether doctor-patient shared understanding can mediate the depth of doctor-patient communication and patient reward behaviors.The research results of this paper are as follows.First,after measuring the doctor-patient shared understanding,(1)the results showed that the status quo of doctor-patient shared understanding are in the range from 0 to 0.5 in OHCs.(2)In details,the results of doctor-patient shared understanding varied among different doctors,while the gap among different departments is small.Second,the empirical results of the antecedents of doctor-patient shared understanding showed that(1)the depth of doctor communication has a positive effect on the doctor-patient shared understanding and the depth of patient communication have an inverted "U" relationship with doctor-patient communication;(2)female doctors are more likely to have higher doctor-patient shared understanding with their patients than male doctors;(3)doctors from Beijing,Shanghai,Guangzhou,Wuhan,Xi’an,Chongqing,Hangzhou,are less likely to have a better doctor-patient shared understanding with patients than from other cities.Finally,The results of empirical study of how the doctor-patient shared understanding influences the patient reward behavior demonstrated that(1)doctor communication depth and the doctor-patient shared understanding have a significant positive effect on patient reward behavior,(2)doctor-patient shared understanding plays a mediating role between the depth of doctor communication and the patient mental reward,but not play a mediating role between the depth of doctor communication and the patient material reward.(3)It shows that there is heterogeneity between material and mental reward behaviors of patients. |
