How online health community participation affects physicians’ performance in hospitals: Empirical evidence from China

Abstract There have been heated ongoing debates about the pros and cons of the online channel to traditional services in hospitals. We examine the digital channel’s effect on healthcare from the trust-transfer and medical service continuity perspectives by focusing on key indicators of performance: outpatient visits, operational efficiency, resource utilization efficiency, patient loyalty, and satisfaction and analyzing 250,344 physician–patient interactions from an online health community (OHC) and a well-known hospital in China over the period from January 2010 to December 2018 through three studies. Our work offers managerial insights on performance improvement by adopting a multi-channel strategy in the emerging era of “Internet plus healthcare.”