Exploration of the nonlinear relationship between social support and the establishment of long-term doctor-patient relationships: An empirical analysis based on virtual doctor teams

Background: The continued development of information technology has led to the emergence of online medical consultation platforms. Online virtual doctor teams, a new model in online medical care, have received significant attention for their ability to provide increased social support to patients. Many scholars have explored the role of social support in doctor-patient communication, usually focusing on a linear relationship between the impact of social support on medical outcomes. In the present study, we will explore the existence of a nonlinear relationship between the two. Methods: In the present study, we use doctor teams from a leading online consultation platform in China-Haodf online (https://www.Haodf.com), as our research object. In total, 610 doctor teams and 413,778 consultation records spanning from June 2017 to November 2019 are collected and used to explore how social support supplied by doctor teams during interactive communication would affect the establishment of long-term doctor-patient relationships. We also explore the moderating role of team leadership type in this process. From the perspective of social support theory, we select representative factors of informational support and emotional support provided by doctor teams, namely, medical term use and emotional expression. We use text and sentiment analysis methods to extract social support contained in the texts of online doctor team-patient interactions and classify doctor teams into strong and weak leadership types based on leader-member status distance. Further, we used a logistic regression model to empirically analyze the nonlinear relationship between social support and long-term doctor-patient relationship establishment and the moderating effects of team leadership types in this process. Results: The present results show that inverted U-shaped relationships exist among medical term use, emotional expression, and long-term doctor-patient relationship establishment, respectively. Doctor teams with strong leadership type make the inverted U-shaped curve between medical term use and long-term doctor-patient relationship establishment flatter than teams with weak leadership type. Conclusion: In the present study, we enrich the application of social support theory in the field of online health consultation and provide suggestions for how different types of online doctor teams provide social support to patients.