Online written consultation, telephone consultation and offline appointment: An examination of the channel effect in online health communities.

INTRODUCTION: The emergence of online health communities broadens and diversifies channels for patient-doctor interaction. Given limited medical resources, online health communities aim to provide better treatment by decreasing medical costs, making full use of available resources and providing more diverse channels for patients.

OBJECTIVES: This research examines how online channel usage affects offline channels, i.e., "Online Booking, Service in Hospitals" (OBSH), and how the channel effects change with doctors' online and offline reputation.

METHODS: The study uses data of 4254 doctors from a Chinese online health community.

RESULTS: Our findings demonstrate a strong relationship between online health communities and offline hospital communication with an important moderating role for reputation. There are significant channel effects, wherein written consultation complements OBSH (β=3.320, p<0.10), but telephone consultation can be a readily substitute for OBSH (β=-9.854, p<0.001). We also find that doctors with higher online and offline reputations can attract more patients to use the OBSH (βonline =0.433, p<0.001; βoffline =2.318&2.123, p<0.001). Third, channel effects fluctuate, relative to doctors' online and offline reputations: doctors with higher online reputations mitigate substitution effects between telephone consultation and OBSH (β=0.064, p<0.01), and doctors with higher offline reputations mitigate complementary effects between written consultation and OBSH (β=-1.586&-1.417, p<0.001).

CONCLUSIONS: This study contributes to both knowledge and practice. This study shows that there is channel effect in healthcare, websites' managers can encourage physicians to provide online services, especially for these physicians who do not have enough patients.