Exploring the Effects of Governance Mechanism on Patient' Usage Intention in Web-based Consultation Platforms (Preprint)
BACKGROUND In recent years, the Internet has been gradually applied to the field of medical services. With the advantages of no time and geographical restrictions on the web-based medical treatment has begun to flourish in China. In the web-based medical market, individual patients are in a relatively weak position, so they mainly rely on the web-based medical platform operators to ensure the quality of medical services. OBJECTIVE Based on social exchange theory and transaction cost theory, this paper empirically studies the influence of governance mechanism on online patients' willingness to use, and explores the moderating effect of perceived uncertainty on the influence of social exchange theory and transaction cost theory. METHODS In this paper, a questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain the online patients’ attitudes towards medical service providers including the physicians and medical websites.In this survey, a total of 600 questionnaires were sent out, of which 565 were effectively recovered. Among them, 133 were invalid questionnaires eliminated. RESULTS Stratified linear regression analysis showed that supervision mechanism, reputation mechanism and communication mechanism had a significant positive effect on online patients' willingness to use. The perceived uncertainty doctors' behavior has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between supervision mechanism, reputation mechanism, communication mechanism and online patient willingness to use. Website perceived uncertainty moderates the relationship between supervision mechanism, reputation mechanism and online patients' willingness to use. This paper provides a basis and reference for improving the willingness of online patients through platform governance of Internet medical treatment. CONCLUSIONS The innovation of this paper is to introduce the website governance mechanism and perceived uncertainty into the Internet medical research to explore how the website governance mechanism affects patients' usage willingness. Based on the website governance mechanism, a model of the influence of perceived uncertainty on online patients' willingness to use was constructed. The perceived uncertainty and the website governance mechanism can be applied to a new field--the web-based medical field. Moreover, it enriches the web-based medical platform theory, which makes the research of patient seeking medical treatment more in-depth and specific and more scientific and rigorous.