Effectiveness of interactive tools in online health care communities: Social exchange theory perspective

Abstract

Background: Although the COVID-19 pandemic will have a negative effect on China's economy in the short term, it also represents a major opportunity for internet-based medical treatment in the medium and long term. Compared with normal times, internet-based medical platforms including the Haodf website were visited by 1.11 billion people, the number of new registered users of all platforms increased by 10, and the number of new users' daily consultations increased by 9 during the pandemic. The continuous participation of physicians is a major factor in the success of the platform, and economic return is an important reason for physicians to provide internet-based services. However, no study has provided the effectiveness of interactive tools in online health care communities to influence physicians' returns. Objective: The effect of internet-based effort on the benefits and effectiveness of interactive effort tools in internet-based health care areas remains unclear. Thus, the goals of this study are to examine the effect of doctors' internet-based service quality on their economic returns during COVID-19 social restrictions, to examine the effect of mutual help groups on doctors' economic returns during COVID-19 social restrictions, and to explore the moderating effect of disease privacy on doctors' efforts and economic returns during COVID-19 social restrictions. Methods: On the basis of the social exchange theory, this study establishes an internet-based effort exchange model for doctors. We used a crawler to download information automatically from Haodf website. From March 5 to 7, 2020, which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, cross-sectional information of 2530 doctors were collected. Results: Hierarchical linear regression showed that disease privacy (β=.481; P