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The Impact of Reviews of Physicians on Patient Choice

  • Yingying Li*
  • , Tianshi Wu
  • , Hong Wu
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

How reviews impact patient choice in health field is still unknown. Patients often worry about their diseases and are eager to find a high skill physician to cure their painful. Traditional hospitals often lack information about individual physician, and with the emergence of online health communities (OHCs), patients can get physician service information on the platform. This study researches the role of reviews in health field and how the roles change with different diseases by collecting data from an online health community. We divide patient reviews into two kinds: online service reviews and offline service reviews based on different services. We find disease risk significantly moderates the relationship between reviews and patient choice: when patients get high-risk diseases, they care more offline service reviews than low-risk diseases. On the contrary, when patients get low-risk diseases, they care more online service reviews than high-risk diseases.

Original languageEnglish
Pages215-226
Number of pages12
StatePublished - 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event15th Wuhan International Conference on E-Business, WHICEB 2016 - Wuhan, China
Duration: 27 May 201629 May 2016

Conference

Conference15th Wuhan International Conference on E-Business, WHICEB 2016
Country/TerritoryChina
CityWuhan
Period27/05/1629/05/16

Keywords

  • Disease risk
  • Online health communities
  • Patient choice
  • Patient reviews

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