Presentation mode matters: examining how patients and healthcare professionals present content text during online health advice interaction

Good health advice can help patients make the difference between a poor and a positive quality of life. When patients seek advice online, it is similar to search for a second opinion. Presentation mode could play a crucial role in the process of advice seeking and giving. For example, physicians may be reluctant to provide advice if a patient's question is long and difficult to find key information. To enhance the efficacy of communication, we examine the effective presentation mode of content for patients and healthcare professionals during online health advice interactions. We collect large-scale observational data from a leading online medical platform in China. We run a series of regressions with fixed effects. Our dataset consists of 993,323 records of physician-patient advice interactions on an online medical platform. We find that patients are more likely to receive responses from health professionals when they use the template provided by the platform. However, patients are less likely to adopt a health professional's advice content with the template. Our research highlights the importance of the presentation mode of content for patients and healthcare professionals during the online health advice interaction. It is a crucial extension of advice response theory (ART).