How Do Mobile Medical Apps Promote Offline Healthcare Management Activities Availably

Abstract

Mobile medical Apps help customers to engage in their own healthcare management activities. Customers can make full use of mobile medical Apps to get involved anytime and anywhere and to constantly manage their healthcare activities. However, customer loyalty to mobile medical Apps is pretty low, and customers do not use such Apps very frequently. So we are addressing the following research questions: （1）what factors on the App platforms will affect customer offline value co-creation activities? （2）how to promote the role of mobile medical Apps in offline health care management activities more effectively? （3）how to keep the mobile medical Apps stickiness（that is the customers’ long-term intentions to use mobile medical Apps）? This paper explores the effect of customer online interactions（interpersonal interaction and App platform interaction）on customer offline healthcare management activities, and then how customer healthcare knowledge and perceived disease criticality can enhance or hinder the effect of these two customer online interactions on customer healthcare management activities, which leads to customers’ long-term intentions to use Apps. Specifically, a mobile medical App provides doctors and patients with a platform for online communication and interactions. On the platform, interpersonal interactions between patients, and between patients and doctors are being carried out. At the same time, the characteristics of App design also become important factors affecting customers’ dependence and use on the platform（App platform interaction）. These two types of interaction are customer online interactions that become the important components of the mobile medical App interactions. According to locus of control theory, these two kinds of interaction can enhance intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and then lead to active offline healthcare management activities（offline value co-creation）. Customer healthcare knowledge （internal control） and perceived disease criticality （external control） influence the relationship between the two types of customer online interactions and the customer offline healthcare management activities（offline value co-creation）. Based on 195 users’ data from the mobile medical Apps, it shows that most of the hypotheses are supported. More specifically, social interaction and platform interaction enhance customer offline co-creation activities, which in turn lead to future App use intentions. Meantime, the role of online customer interactions in offline value co-creation activities depends on customer healthcare knowledge and perceived disease criticality. The contributions of this paper are mainly manifested in the following aspects: first of all, this paper enriches the research of value co-creation. There have been numerous studies investigating co-creation but separating online and offline co-creation respectively, and research on online co-creation has occurred more often in online community settings without discussing its role in offline co-creation. This paper incorporates online interactions and offline activities to explore how online customer interactions can affect offline healthcare management activities. Secondly, this paper adds nuance to healthcare management research. The extant literature on healthcare management mainly focuses on the following aspects: the exploration of the definition of value co-creation activities, the improvement of services quality and the relationship management between doctors and patients. It shows that many of the scholars have investigated offline healthcare management activities. At the same time, most of the studies on value co-creation are qualitative research. This paper empirically explores the mechanism of online and offline value co-creation in mobile medical Apps. Furthermore, this paper also explores customer interactions on the Apps, which complements the study of online interactions. Previous studies have mainly discussed the interactions in the online communities or social media, but have ignored the role of interactions in mobile Apps. This paper defines the App interaction and divides it into interpersonal interaction and App platform interaction, which incorporates online interaction and offline co-creation activities for the first time.