Online health communities have become one of the most important means for people to seek social support during the coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This study details content analysis of ...support-seeking strategies and social support offered on the online forum “Baidu COVID-19bar” across different stages of initial stage as well as during the entire initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that asking for support and disclosing directly were the main strategies used across the different stages and during the entire initial stage. Informational support and emotional support were the most common types sought in the first two stages and the entire initial stage, and informational support was the main type during the decline stage. Furthermore, asking for support was more likely to elicit informational support while disclosing directly was more likely to elicit emotional support. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
In online health communities (OHCs), patients can exchange social support through text-based communication. However, research on how various linguistic characteristics of patients' communication in ...these communities affect their social support outcomes remains limited. This study performs linguistic profiling on OHC participants based on a large dataset and empirically evaluates how lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features affect users' communication and social support outcomes. The results show that lexical richness in health-related vocabulary negatively correlates with receiving informational support. The readability and brevity of written texts have positive relationships with incoming social support. Writing longer sentences positively correlates with receiving informational support but negatively correlates with receiving emotional support. Expressing negative sentiment leads to higher chances of receiving both types of social support. The use of terms related to perception and body parts increases the chances of receiving emotional support. The use of terms related to perception words additionally correlates to higher chances of receiving informational support. To receive social supports, being logical in expressions is also critical. Furthermore, the relationships between shared health language and social support are determined by the word category and social support type.
•This paper aims to advance understanding of the knowledge collaboration process by exploring the role of the transactive memory system in online health communities.•Both antecedence and consequences ...of KC have been examined by using big sample and real operation data.•This paper conceptualizes the moderating effects of coordination on the relationships between specification/credibility and performance.•This paper divides coordination within teams into three different collaborative modes and finds their different influences on teams’ performance.
Knowledge teams have emerged in online health communities (OHCs) where physicians collaborate spontaneously with others through the Internet to gather knowledge. Knowledge collaboration (KC) facilitates physicians’ communication and the provision of better services to patients in today's medical environment. However, the underlying mechanism through which KC improves team performance in OHCs is not clear. This study aims to advance understanding of the KC process by exploring the role of the transactive memory system (TMS). Real operation data from 1071 teams in a leading OHC in China used to understand both the antecedent and consequences of the TMS and the interaction effects among different dimensions of TMS. The findings have demonstrated that leader's capital was a critical factor in KC by promoting the effective TMS development and further affect both team's process and outcome performance. Positive moderating effects of coordination on the relationship between credibility and performance are also found. This study reveals for the first time the role of KC in improving performance in online health markets from the TMS perspective. The findings provide theoretical guidance to physician–physician collaborative teams with guidelines on boosting chances for higher performance.
Online health communities (OHCs) have enjoyed increasing popularity in recent years, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, several concerns have been raised regarding the ...privacy of users' personal information in OHCs. Considering that OHCs are a type of data-sharing or data-driven platform, it is crucial to determine whether users' health information privacy concerns influence their behaviors in OHCs. Thus, by conducting a survey, this study explores the impact of users' health information privacy concerns on their engagement and payment behavior (Paid) in OHCs. The empirical results show that users' concerns about health information privacy reduce their Paid in OHCs by negatively influencing their OHC engagement. Further analysis reveals that if users have higher benefit appraisals (i.e., perceived informational and emotional support from OHCs) and lower threat appraisals (i.e., perceived severity and vulnerability of information disclosure from OHCs), the negative effect of health information privacy concerns on users' OHC engagement will decrease.
•We empirically examine the effect of self-regulation and social support in online health communities.•We explore how information support and emotional support impact health goal management.•We ...explore how self-reflection and attention control impact health goal management.•We develop a research model based on social cognitive theory.
We investigate the effectiveness of goal management in online health communities (OHCs) in light of social support and self-regulation for patients with chronic diseases. With a five-year longitudinal data set, we found that informational support contributes to both goal progress and self-reflection. Emotional support encourages patients to practice self-reflection if the goals are set for non-mental diseases. We also find that patients' self-reflection promotes goal progress. Finally, the lack of attention control negatively affects goal progress and self-reflection. Grounded in social cognitive theory, this study is among the first to empirically examine the effect of self-regulation and social support in OHCs.
Purpose Online medical teams (OMTs) have emerged as an innovative healthcare service mode that relies on the collaboration of doctors to produce comprehensive medical recommendations. This study ...delves into the relationship between knowledge collaboration and team performance in OMTs and examines the complex effects of participation patterns. Design/methodology/approach The analysis uses a dataset that consists of 2,180 OMTs involving 8,689 doctors. Ordinary least squares regression with robust standard error is adopted for data analysis. Findings Our findings demonstrate a positive influence of knowledge collaboration on OMT performance. Leader participation weakens the relationship between knowledge collaboration and team performance, whereas multidisciplinary participation strengthens it. Passive participation and chief doctor participation have no significant effect on the association between knowledge collaboration and OMT performance. Originality/value This study provides valuable insights into how knowledge collaboration shapes OMTs' performance and reveals how the participation of different types of members affects outcomes. Our findings offer important practical implications for the optimization of online health platforms and for enhancing the effectiveness of collaborative healthcare delivery.
This study examines patients’ use of different compliments for healthcare service quality through a three-stage process in the transaction cycle: pre-, during-, and after-sale. Based on the ...transaction cycle framework, we explore how a patient’s choice for psychological and material compliments is affected by service quality received at different stages, and how the effects vary depending on the service price. Using data collected from an online health community (OHC) in China, we reveal several important findings. First, service quality at each stage is an important driver of patient compliments. Second, high service quality at the pre- and after-sale stages motivate patients to give material compliments rather than psychological compliments, whereas psychological compliment is more likely to be triggered for high service quality received at the during-sale stage. Third, service quality at one stage enhances the effect of service quality at its subsequent stages on compliments. Fourth, service price increases the influence of service quality on compliments, and patients tend to give material returns over psychological returns for doctors charging high service price. This paper extends prior research on service quality from a transaction cycle perspective and provides OHCs with implications for theory and practice.
•We research the impact of online service provision on patient satisfaction (PS) in OHCs.•We examine the reverted U-shaped relationship between service price and PS in OHCs.•We investigate the ...negative effect of price difference on PS in OHCs.•We test the mediating effect of flexibility of service selection.
Background The emergence of online health communities (OHCs) broadens and diversifies channels for patient-doctor interaction. In recent times, patient satisfaction has gained new attention within the context of OHCs where unique patterns are provided: a variety of services with unique attributes are available in OHCs for patients and doctors have the options of providing and pricing for different services. OHCs are given high hopes on improving medical efficiency and patient satisfaction. Knowing how these patterns in OHCs affect patient satisfaction is crucial for the development of OHCs and medical practices.
An empirical research is conducted to examine the effects of provision and pricing of online services on patient satisfaction by analyzing data from 2309 doctors in a Chinese OHC.
The results from this study provided empirical support, suggesting that service quantity positively influenced patient satisfaction. A non-linear correlation between service price and satisfaction was explored and results suggested an inverted U-shaped relationship. At the low price level, service price led to an increase in patient satisfaction, whereas the high price level (over 330 CNY/US$49) could have just the opposite effect. Importantly, we found that price difference between a doctor’s different services significantly decreased patient satisfaction. A mediating effect was tested in post-hoc analyses, and results revealed that the impact of price difference on patient satisfaction was partially mediated by flexibility of service selection, and the mediating effect accounted for 28.6% of the total effect.
Our results indicate that patient satisfaction can be improved by effectively providing and pricing services in OHCs. Specifically, doctors can offer different type services and charge within a reasonable range.
As the national awareness of health keeps deepening, online health communities (OHCs) have achieved rapid development. Users’ participation is critically important to the sustainable development of ...OHCs. Nevertheless, users usually lack the motive for participation. Based on the social capital theory, this research examines factors influencing users’ participation in OHCs. The purpose of this research is to find out decisive factors that influence users’ participation in OHCs, enrich the understanding of users’ participation in OHCs, and help OHCs address the issue of sustainable development. The research model was empirically tested using 1277 responses from an online survey conducted in China. Data was analyzed using the structural equation modeling (SEM). We found informational support and emotional support to have significant direct effects over the structural capital, relational capital and cognitive capital of OHCs. Meanwhile, it is observed that relational capital and cognitive capital degree have a significant influence on knowledge acquisition and knowledge contribution of OHCs. For researchers this study provides a basis for further refinement of individual models of users’ participation. For practitioners, understanding the social capital is crucial to users’ knowledge acquisition and knowledge contribution that achieve high participation in OHCs.
•Team diversity should be considered when building online physician teams.•Reputation diversity and experience diversity help increase team performance.•Star physicians weaken the influence of ...reputation diversity on team performance.•Star physicians strengthen the influence of experience diversity on team performance.
With the increasing popularity of the Internet, people progressively seek health advice through online health communities (OHCs). Physician in OHCs are often self-organized into teams to provide on-demand health services which can meet patients’ diverse needs and attract patients to buy their services. Although many prior studies have investigated OHC physician performance at the individual level, little research exists on team level performance. To fill that gap, this paper analyzes whether the team diversity of online physician teams influence team performance in OHCs in specific the context of China according to the signaling theory. Using data from one of the most popular OHCs in China, we employ fixed-effect models to evaluate the effect of team diversity of online medical teams on team performance from the perspective of signal transmission. The results indicate that the reputation diversity and experience diversity of physicians in OHC teams exert positive influences on team performance. Meanwhile, whether an OHC team has star physicians has different moderating effects on the relationship between two kinds of team diversity and team performance. Specifically, the existence of star physicians will increase the positive influences of experience diversity, but weaken the positive effect of reputation diversity on team performance. Our results support the need for considering the team diversity as a potential solution to improve the performance of online medical teams in Chinese OHCs.
