Doctor–patient relationship strength’s impact in an online healthcare community

ABSTRACT

Doctor–patient (D–P) interaction currently faces a set of challenges owing to a dearth in medical resources and related communication reasons. Healthcare information technology and associated systems, such as those supporting online healthcare communities (OHCs) that provide new platforms for information exchange and online communication, are expected to alter traditional D–P relationship models. Despite significant results from extant research indicating patient benefits, empirical research on OHC returns for physicians is lacking. This exploratory study examines the strength of the D–P relationship and its impacts on physicians’ individual outcomes in an OHC. Guided by the social capital and social ties theories, and using a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach to study 339,010 instances of doctor–patient communication from 1430 physicians at The Good Doctor (www.Haodf.com), which is one of the largest Chinese OHCs, we found that weak ties can result in economic and social returns for doctors. However, further analysis has indicated that strong ties mediate the effect of weak ties, thus encouraging doctors to convert weak ties into strong ties by mobilizing their website settings to strengthen their relationships and, subsequently, to be better rewarded. Implications for research and practice on the development of healthcare information technology and associated systems are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctor–patient relationship
• online healthcare community
• social capital
• social ties
• doctor–patient communication

Acknowledgments

Any opinions, findings or recommendation expressed here are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the sponsors of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Shanshan Guo is a PhD doctoral candidate in Management Science and Engineering at the School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology. She is a training jointly doctoral student with National University of Singapore and she has also spent one year in graduate study at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Her current research interests include eHealth, online healthcare community, healthcare capital and social media.

Xitong Guo is Professor of Information Systems at the Harbin Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong and PhD in Management Science and Engineering at the University of Science and Technology of China. His research focuses on e-Health. His work has been published in referred journals, including Journal of Management Information Systems, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, Decisions Support Systems, among others.

Xiaofei Zhang is a joint PhD candidate of Harbin Institute of Technology and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interest is in the area of IT-related healthcare. His research has appeared in Electronic Commerce with Research and Applications, Telemedicine and eHealth, Technology and Health care, and others.

Doug Vogel is Professor of Information Systems (IS) and, currently, Director of the eHealth Research Institute for the Harbin Institute of Technology School of Management in China. He received his MS in Computer Science from U.C.L.A. and his PhD in Business Administration (Management Information Systems) from the University of Minnesota where he was also research coordinator for the MIS Research Center. He has published widely and been recognized as the most-cited IS author in Asia Pacific. He is currently engaged in introducing mobile devices and support for integrated collaborative applications in educational and healthcare systems with a focus on well-being.

Notes

1 This is a phenomenon of a specific medical care system. Without private options, doctors of China and other developing counties are treated as public resources. Each doctor has many patients and each patient can go to different doctors when he/she is ill. It is somewhat like a free market.

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grants [71531007, 71622002, 71471048, and 71490720].