BACKGROUND
An increasing number of people visit online health communities to esquire health information with doctors. In the online health community (OHC), patient crowds tended to label and vote the doctors’ specialties with encountered disease. Understanding how patients’ online labels can help us understand the service diversity for patients in online health communities and provide constructive suggestions for doctors serving more patients online.
OBJECTIVE
Our goal was to understand: (1) what kind of patterns are the labels of patient crowdvotes aggregated service diversity, including encountered disease labels and online votes, in a OHC? (2) wheather the patient crowdvotes aggregated service diversity make doctors’ service sales difference in OHC? (3) how can managers in OHC perform to improve doctors’ service sales with the feedback of crowdvotes aggregated service diversity?
METHODS
We designed a retrospective study with data collected from the largest OHC (Good Doctor website) in China. We first used descriptive statistics to investigate the patient crowdvotes aggregated service diversity. Then a multiple log-linear relationship was adapted to investigate the main and the interaction impact of service diversity on doctors’ service sales.
RESULTS
Our sample consists of 9,841 doctors from 1,255 different hospitals widely distributed in China. 18,997,018 patients had been serviced by these doctors since they became members of the study OHC. 704,467 votes of doctors’ clinical specialties were labeled by patient crowds in recent two years (Aug.26, 2015-Aug. 25, 2017). Gini coefficient of serviced patients is very high, 0.626, followed by the volume of votes (0.562). Based on the regression model, we found that the coefficients of the control variables, doctor review rating and clinic title, were 0.810(0.041), and 1.735 (0.027), respectively. For the breadth of voted specialties, volume of votes and degree of voted diversity, the standardized coefficient of the main effect were 0.309 (0.038), 0.745 (0.014) and 0.073 (0.018), respectively. All of the estimates are statistically significant at a 0.1% level.
CONCLUSIONS
Our study provided empirical evidence that the patterns of both the labels of patient crowdvotes aggregated service diversity and doctors’ service sales were of inequality (as illustrated in Lorenz curves) in the distribution of its size of serviced patients in a OHC. Patient crowds’ online labels also leaded to differences in the doctors’ service sales online. The treads of the doctors’ service sales kept increasing as the patient crowdvotes aggregated service diversity increased. Finally, our findings suggested that the higher breadth of voted specialties and degree of voted diversity displayed a greater service sales with a higher review rating, deploying less inequality of Doctors’ service sales.