Zhang Yuting, Qiu Chutong, Zhang Jiantong
School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China.
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA.
Healthcare (Basel). 2022 May 24;10(6):977. doi: 10.3390/healthcare10060977.
As an indispensable part of contemporary medical services, Internet-based medical platforms can provide patients with a full range of multi-disciplinary and multi-modal treatment services. Along with the emergence of many healthcare influencers and the increasing connection between online and offline consultations, the operation of individual physicians and their teams on Internet-based medical platforms has started to attract a lot of attention. The purpose of this paper is to, based on an Internet platform, study how the information on physicians' homepages influences patients' consultation behavior, so as to provide suggestions for the construction of physicians' personal websites. We distinguish variables into strong- and weak-ties types, dependent on whether deep social interactions between physicians and patients have happened. If there exist further social interactions, we define the variable as the "strong ties" type, otherwise, "weak ties". The patients' consultation behavior will be expressed as the volume of online consultation, i.e., the number of patients. We obtained the strong and weak ties information of each physician based on EWM (entropy weight method), so as to establish a regression model with explained variable, i.e., the number of patients, and three explanatory variables, i.e., the strong and weak ties information, and their interaction term. The estimation results verified our hypotheses and proved to be robust. It showed that both strong and weak ties information can positively influence patients' consultation behavior, and the influence of weak ties information is greater. Regarding the positive influence of strong and weak ties, we found a trade off effect between them. Based on the results, we finalize with some suggestions on how to improve a physician's online medical consultation volume.
作为当代医疗服务不可或缺的一部分，基于互联网的医疗平台可以为患者提供全方位的多学科、多模式治疗服务。随着众多医疗健康领域有影响力的人物的出现以及线上线下会诊联系的日益紧密，个体医生及其团队在基于互联网的医疗平台上的运营开始受到广泛关注。本文旨在基于一个互联网平台，研究医生主页上的信息如何影响患者的会诊行为，以便为医生个人网站的建设提供建议。我们根据医生与患者之间是否发生深度社会互动，将变量分为强关系型和弱关系型。如果存在进一步的社会互动，我们将该变量定义为“强关系”型，否则为“弱关系”型。患者的会诊行为将用在线会诊量来表示，即患者数量。我们基于熵权法（EWM）获取了每位医生的强关系和弱关系信息，从而建立了一个以解释变量（即患者数量）以及三个解释变量（即强关系和弱关系信息及其交互项）为基础的回归模型。估计结果验证了我们的假设且结果稳健。结果表明，强关系和弱关系信息都能对患者的会诊行为产生积极影响，且弱关系信息的影响更大。关于强关系和弱关系的积极影响，我们发现了它们之间的权衡效应。基于这些结果，我们最后就如何提高医生的在线会诊量提出了一些建议。
