文献类型：期刊文献

英文题名：Social contagion of online physician choice: the infection and immunity mechanism

作者：Li, Jia[1];Ma, Shengkang[1];Yen, David C.[2];Ma, Ling[1]

机构：[1]East China Univ Sci & Technol, Shanghai, Peoples R China;[2]Texas Southern Univ, Houston, TX 77004 USA

年份：2025

卷号：77

期号：1

起止页码：133

外文期刊名：ASLIB JOURNAL OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

收录：;EI(收录号：20233814764708);WOS:【SSCI(收录号:WOS:001067599400001)，SCI-EXPANDED(收录号:WOS:001067599400001)】；

基金：This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers: 72271093 and 71971082) and Humanity and Social Science Youth foundation of Ministry of Education of China (grant number: 18YJC630068).

语种：英文

外文关键词：E-health; Online consultation; Social contagion; Infection and immunity; Panel vector autoregression

摘要：PurposeIn the digital age, the spread of online behavior and real-world information leads to social contagion. This study aims to investigate the contagion phenomenon of online physician choice and then discuss its potential influence on the sub-specialization process in the healthcare service industry. In specific, this study aims to propose the basic mechanism of infection and immunity as follows - exposure to antigen may lead to an immune response, and the success of the immune response may depend on the provision of appropriate immune signaling.Design/methodology/approachData collected from haodf.com including 4 disease types and 247 physicians from 2008 to 2015 were used to test the proposed hypotheses. Panel vector autoregression method was utilized to analyze the panel data.FindingsThe obtained result shows that social contagion of physician choice over disease type is salient on e-consultation platforms, indicating that physicians associated with/on haodf.com are concentrating on an even narrower type of disease. Disclosing more simple signals (physician history orders) results in more disease concentration for that physician in the future. In contrast, disclosing more detailed signals (physician-contributed knowledge or physician reviews) leads to less disease concentration.Originality/valueThis finding implies that physician-contributed knowledge and physician reviews may act as immune signal which will tend to trigger a success immune response. This study not only suggests managers should be careful about the double-edged sword effect of online physician choice contagion but also provides the useful approaches to promote or restrain such a contagion in a flexible way.