Better interaction performance attracts more chronic patients? Evidence from an online health platform

Online health consultation (OHC) serves as an important approach for patients to take an initial impression of a physician's interaction with their patients. However, little study has paid attention to how physicians leverage their interaction performance to attract patients. Drawing on signaling theory and externality effect, this study investigates how a physician's OHC performance influences patients’ choice of consulting the physician in a chronic disease context on an online health platform. By decomposing a physician's interaction performance into three dimensions, i.e., interaction breadth, interaction length, and interaction depth, this paper provides a novel method to evaluate the physician's performance. Information of 4434 physicians from six departments of chronic diseases at 185 general hospitals in the Tier Three Class A segment across China was collected, including individual information and the OHC records of the physicians. Regression analyses were applied to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that better performance in the interaction breadth and length helps physicians attract more patients while higher interaction depth reduces patients’ choice of physician. A physician's general health knowledge sharing behavior and expertise level intensify the negative effect of interaction depth on patient choice of physician. This study contributes to the literature on online health behavior, chronic disease management, and signaling theory, and offers implications for practice.