What Trigger People Use Physician-Patient Interactive OHCs? An Empirical Research Based Integration Model

Online health community (OHC) has become a hot research topic in the IS filed. A lot of previous studies have focused on online patient support groups or peer-to-peer (P2P) communities, but another kind of OHC, i.e., patient-to-doctor (P2D) communities, is still with less attention. P2D communities link patients and physicians, which have sprung up and developed exponentially all over the world. This research tries to explore users’ intention of P2D communities and the benefits brought by the use. Based on three theory lenses: D&M IS success model, social support theory and social presence theory, we build an integrated model to deeply understand: what factors trigger users’ information seeking and participation intention. A survey is used to collect data from potential young users of two main P2D online health communities (Hao Daifu and Xunyi Wenyao) in China. PLS technique is used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses. We find that the use of P2D communities could bring positive perceived patient-doctor relationship from patients’ perspective; social presence could positively influence users’ information seeking and participation intention both; emotional support is positively related to social presence; and social presence plays a mediated effect between information quality and use intention. Then potential implications and limitations are discussed.