How Online Reviews and Services Affect Physician Outpatient Visits: Content Analysis of Evidence From Two Online Health Care Communities

Background: Online healthcare communities are changing the ways of physician-patient communication and how patients choose outpatient care physicians. Although a majority of empirical work has examined the role of online reviews in consumer decisions, less research has been done in health care, and endogeneity of online reviews has not been fully considered. Moreover, the important factor of physician online services has been neglected in patient decisions. Objective: In this paper, we addressed the endogeneity of online reviews and examined the impact of online reviews and services on outpatient visits based on theories of reviews and channel effects. Methods: We used a difference-in-difference approach to account for physician- and website-specific effects by collecting information from 474 physician homepages on two online health care communities. Results: We found that the number of reviews was more effective in influencing patient decisions compared with the overall review rating. An improvement in reviews leads to a relative increase in physician outpatient visits on that website. There are channel effects in health care: online services complement offline services (outpatient care appointments). Results further indicate that online services moderate the relationship between online reviews and physician outpatient visits. Conclusions: This study investigated the effect of reviews and channel effects in health care by conducting a difference-in-difference analysis on two online health care communities. Our findings provide basic research on online health care communities.