A Study of Influential Factors in Doctor's WOM Effect Within Online Medical Community

Abstract

Online medical communities have bestially alleviated the traditional medical field problems that uneven distribution of medical resources and difficulty seeking medical treatment to a certain extent. Patients in the online medical community pay more attention to the doctors’ word-of-mouth (WOM), resulting in the doctors’ WOM effect. There are few studies on the influencing factors of doctors' WOM effect in online medical communities, hence this study has theoretical and practical application value. By integrating trust theory, social network theory, online reputation feedback mechanism and the research framework of WOM under the Internet, this study constructs factors’ four dimensions that have an impact on doctor's WOM effect, combined with control variables to construct influential factors of doctor's WOM effect in the online medical community. The corresponding indicators that affect the doctor's WOM effect were built and sorted by random forest regression with the doctor's online medical community data. This study performed random permutations and multiple regression based on the selected variables integrated with the control variables to obtain the optimal model. The multiple regression analysis illustrates doctor's WOM effect with control variables exploring the interaction effect. This study explores the optimal model that affects the doctors’ WOM effect in the online medical community and aims to reasonably guide the scientific operation of the online medical community platform.