How Government Endorsement Propels Online Healthcare Platforms

Despite many potential social benefits of online healthcare platforms (OHPs), such as remote healthcare resource access and better healthcare outcomes, patient adoption has not yet taken off. Government endorsement is one of the attempts to propel its development. Our study evaluates the effect of government endorsement and unveils its two channels, utility and trust, in changing patients’ choices. Exploiting a natural experiment based on a government-endorsed new function with two leading OHPs in China, our study documents a surge in online healthcare consultation demand for the endorsed platform. The effect is more salient for hospitals and junior healthcare providers that are becoming established, due to augmented trust. Moreover, we show that this burst in demand does not negatively impact physician effort and patient satisfaction. Our study highlights the load balancing among physicians and hospitals achieved with this government endorsement, which has significant implications for both researchers and practitioners. It also provides a general analytical framework for assessing government initiatives.To get more news about china industry research centers, you can visit acem.sjtu.edu.cn official website.

Sijia Zhou is a PhD candidate of the Department of Information Systems from City University of Hong Kong. She received her bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University. Her research interests focus on online healthcare and social influence. Her research has been published in Information Processing & Management, and accepted in ICSH 2018, WeB 2019, WITS 2019 and PACIS 2020.