Abstract
Under the background of sharing economy, online healthcare has been developing rapidly to ease the pressure of offline medical care. The interaction between doctors and patients is the key element of the sustainable development of online healthcare communities. To explore the influence of doctors' online word-of-mouth, online vitality and consulting service price on consultation volume, we build a multiple regression model taking consultation volume as the dependent variable, online word-of-mouth and online vitality and consulting service price as independent variables. By analyzing the data of 37,977 doctors collected from the online healthcare community, we find that doctors' online word-of-mouth and online vitality have significant positive impacts on consultation volume. Our results also show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between consulting service price and consultation volume, and online word-of-mouth has a greater impact on consultation volume than any other factors. Finally, we put forward suggestions for doctors in online healthcare communities.
Recommended Citation
Li, Xue; Jia, Qian; Chen, Xiaogang; and Fan, Xuehui, "Factors Affecting Consultation Volume in an Online Healthcare Community: Evidence from Online Data in China" (2019). WHICEB 2019 Proceedings. 77.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/whiceb2019/77