Causal Effect of Honorary Titles on Physicians’ Service Volumes in Online Health Communities: Retrospective Study

BACKGROUND: An OHC online health community (OHC) is an interactive platform for virtual communication between patients and physicians. Patients can typically search, seek, and share their experience and rate physicians, who may be involved in giving advice. Some OHC providers provide incentives in form of honorary titles to encourage the web-based involvement of physicians, but it is unclear whether the award of honorary titles has an impact on their consultation volume in an OHC. OBJECTIVE: This study is designed to identify the differential treatment effect of the incentive policy on the service volumes for the subgroups of treatment and control in an OHC. This study aims to answer the following questions: Does an honorary title for physicians impact their service volumes in an OHC? During the period of discontinuity, can we identify the sharp effect of the incentive award on the outcomes of physicians’ service volumes? METHODS: We acquired the targeted samples based on treatment, namely, physicians with an honorary title or not and outcomes measured before and after the award of the 2 subgroups. A regression discontinuity design was applied to investigate the impact of the honorary titles incentive as a treatment in an OHC. There was a sharply discontinuous effect of treatment on physicians’ online health service performance. The experimental data set consisted of 346 physicians in the treatment group (with honorary titles). Applying the propensity score matching method, the same size of physicians (n=346) was matched and selected as the control group. RESULTS: A sharp discontinuity was found at the time of the physician receiving the honorary title. The results showed that the parametric estimates of the coefficient were significantly positively (P<.001) associated with monthly home page views. The jump in the monthly volumes of home page views was much sharper than that of the monthly consultations. CONCLUSIONS: The changes in the volumes of monthly consultations and home page views reflect the differential treatment effect of honorary titles on physicians’ service volumes. The effect of the incentive policy with honorary titles is objectively estimated from both the perspective of online and offline medical services in an OHC. Being named with honorary titles significantly multiplied monthly home page views, yet it did not significantly impact monthly consultations. This may be because consultation capacity is limited by the physician's schedule for consultations.