Exploring the Effect of Market Conditions on Price Premiums in the Online Health Community

Abstract

Online health communities allow doctors to fully use existing medical resources to serve remote patients. They broaden and diversify avenues of interaction between doctors and patients using Internet technology, which have built an online medical consultation market. In this study, the theory of supply and demand was adopted to explore how market conditions of online doctor resources impact price premiums of doctors' online service. Then, we investigated the effect of the stigmatized diseases. We used resource supply and resource concentration to characterize the market conditions of online doctor resources and a dummy variable to categorize whether the disease is stigmatized or ordinary. After an empirical study of the dataset (including 68,945 doctors), the results indicate that: (1) the supply of online doctor resources has a significant and negative influence on price premiums; (2) compared with ordinary diseases, doctors treating stigmatized diseases can charge higher price premiums; (3) stigmatized diseases positively moderate the relationship between resource supply and price premiums; and (4) the concentration of online doctor resources has no significant influence on price premiums. Our research demonstrates that both the market conditions of online doctor resources and stigmatized diseases can impact price premiums in the online medical consultation market. The findings provide some new and insightful implications for theory and practice. returns for doctors, decreasing health disparities for society as a whole, in addition to providing other benefits [5,[9][10][11]. Currently, many online health communities provide similar online services for doctors and patients, such as Good Doctor and Chunyu Doctor in China, and Quickrxrefill, MDproactive, and Livehealthonline in the USA.Compared with doctors in physical hospitals, in online health communities, doctors have more options to choose service provision at their convenience [12]. Online medical consultation, as one of the most popular and useful service functions, is provided for patients who need professional medical diagnosis and do not visit hospitals [13]. Doctors in online health communities have the pricing power for the online medical consultation service [12]; they can set price for the online medical consultation service based on their capabilities and circumstances [14,15]. Many studies have examined factors affecting service price and returns [11,12,16], such as doctor reputation, professional title, and hospital rank. Recent studies have mainly focused on the relationships between service prices and doctors' personal characteristics, which is necessary but insufficient. Online health communities have built an online medical consultation marketplace for doctors and patients [17,18]. In this online market, doctors with strong medical skills can obtain high service fees above the average price, to charge price premiums and receive higher returns [19,20]. In our study, the research context, Good Doctor (Haodf.com), is one of the leading and typica...

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Anxiety and depression among pregnant women undergoing IVF-ET and WeChat group peer support during the COVID-19 pandemic: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

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