Abstract
As an increasingly important application, online consultation platform allows patients to connect remotely with physicians to receive treatment advice. While bringing convenience to patients, it also provides kinds of physician’s information for patients and leads them to have trouble in making online medical choice decisions. By exploring the antecedents of physician self-descriptive information on patient’s decision, we hope to bridge the gap in the existing literature. Rooted in signaling theory, we study the impact of doctors’ self-descriptive information, namely the richness of doctors’ personal descriptive information and expertise information on patients’ decision making in the specific context of an online consultation platform. Based on a dataset of 1824 observations on Haodf, a leading online consultation platform in China, we tested our hypotheses using text analysis methods. We find that both the richness of descriptive information and expertise information positively affect patients’ choice. Moreover, patients pay more attention to physician’s skills, influence as well as the coverage of physician’s expertise when making decision. The research findings indicate that patient’s preferences for doctors provide strong support and guidance for improving doctor-patient relationships and offer implications for medical practices and healthcare platforms improvement.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Ministry of Education (22YJA630018), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(2022JJ007) and Beijing Polytechnic(2023X019-SXZ).
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Fan, J., Geng, H., Shao, F., Ma, Q. (2023). The Influence of Physician Self-descriptive Information on Patients’ Decision-Making in Online Consultation Platform. In: Salvendy, G., Wei, J. (eds) Design, Operation and Evaluation of Mobile Communications . HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14052. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35921-7_18
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