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The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China
BACKGROUND: In online medical consulting platforms, physicians can get both economic and social returns by offering online medical services, such as answering questions or sharing health care knowledge with patients. Physicians’ online prosocial behavior could bring many benefits to the health care...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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JMIR Publications
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6688439/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31350834 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/14685 |
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author | Jing, Dong Jin, Yu Liu, Jianwei |
author_facet | Jing, Dong Jin, Yu Liu, Jianwei |
author_sort | Jing, Dong |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: In online medical consulting platforms, physicians can get both economic and social returns by offering online medical services, such as answering questions or sharing health care knowledge with patients. Physicians’ online prosocial behavior could bring many benefits to the health care industry. Monetary incentives could encourage physicians to engage more in online medical communities. However, little research has studied the impact of monetary incentives on physician prosocial behavior and the heterogeneity of this effect. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the effects of monetary incentives on physician prosocial behavior and investigate the moderation effects of self-recognition and recognition from others of physician competence. METHODS: This study was a fixed-effect specification-regression model based on a difference-in-differences design with robust standard errors clustered at the physician level using monthly panel data. It included 26,543 physicians in 3851 hospitals over 133 months (November 2006-December 2017) from a leading online health care platform in China. We used the pricing strategy of physicians and satisfaction levels to measure their own and patients’ degree of recognition, respectively. Physicians’ prosocial behavior was measured by free services offered. RESULTS: The introduction of monetary incentives had a positive effect on physician prosocial behavior (β=1.057, P<.01). Higher self-recognition and others’ recognition level of physician competence increased this promotion effect (γ=0.275, P<.01 and γ=0.325, P<.01). CONCLUSIONS: This study explored the positive effect of the introduction of monetary incentives on physician prosocial behavior. We found this effect was enhanced for physicians with a high level of self-recognition and others’ recognition of their competence. We provide evidence of the effect of monetary incentives on physicians’ prosocial behaviors in the telemedicine markets and insight for relevant stakeholders into how to design an effective incentive mechanism to improve physicians’ prosocial engagements. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6688439 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | JMIR Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-66884392019-08-20 The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China Jing, Dong Jin, Yu Liu, Jianwei J Med Internet Res Original Paper BACKGROUND: In online medical consulting platforms, physicians can get both economic and social returns by offering online medical services, such as answering questions or sharing health care knowledge with patients. Physicians’ online prosocial behavior could bring many benefits to the health care industry. Monetary incentives could encourage physicians to engage more in online medical communities. However, little research has studied the impact of monetary incentives on physician prosocial behavior and the heterogeneity of this effect. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the effects of monetary incentives on physician prosocial behavior and investigate the moderation effects of self-recognition and recognition from others of physician competence. METHODS: This study was a fixed-effect specification-regression model based on a difference-in-differences design with robust standard errors clustered at the physician level using monthly panel data. It included 26,543 physicians in 3851 hospitals over 133 months (November 2006-December 2017) from a leading online health care platform in China. We used the pricing strategy of physicians and satisfaction levels to measure their own and patients’ degree of recognition, respectively. Physicians’ prosocial behavior was measured by free services offered. RESULTS: The introduction of monetary incentives had a positive effect on physician prosocial behavior (β=1.057, P<.01). Higher self-recognition and others’ recognition level of physician competence increased this promotion effect (γ=0.275, P<.01 and γ=0.325, P<.01). CONCLUSIONS: This study explored the positive effect of the introduction of monetary incentives on physician prosocial behavior. We found this effect was enhanced for physicians with a high level of self-recognition and others’ recognition of their competence. We provide evidence of the effect of monetary incentives on physicians’ prosocial behaviors in the telemedicine markets and insight for relevant stakeholders into how to design an effective incentive mechanism to improve physicians’ prosocial engagements. JMIR Publications 2019-07-26 /pmc/articles/PMC6688439/ /pubmed/31350834 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/14685 Text en ©Dong Jing, Yu Jin, Jianwei Liu. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 26.07.2019. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Jing, Dong Jin, Yu Liu, Jianwei The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China |
title | The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China |
title_full | The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China |
title_fullStr | The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China |
title_full_unstemmed | The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China |
title_short | The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physician Prosocial Behavior in Online Medical Consulting Platforms: Evidence From China |
title_sort | impact of monetary incentives on physician prosocial behavior in online medical consulting platforms: evidence from china |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6688439/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31350834 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/14685 |
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