No pains no gains: understanding the impacts of physician efforts in online reviews on outpatient appointment

Purpose This study aims to investigate the impact of physician efforts in online reviews on outpatient appointments, while also examining the moderating effect of physician title. Design/methodology/approach This study employs the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) to analyze the impact of physician efforts on outpatient appointments. Subsequently, a fixed effect model is employed to examine the research model using an 89-week panel dataset (from April 16, 2018 to December 29, 2019) comprising appointment and online review information pertaining to 8,157 physicians from a prominent online health community in China. Findings The findings suggest that physicians with lower professional titles exhibit a significantly higher inclination to enhance heuristic information (e.g. attracting helpful votes) compared to those with higher professional title. All physicians can enhance their outpatient appointments by dedicating efforts towards improving systematic review information, but physician title would weaken the relationship. Moreover, the effect of increasing review volume is considerably more substantial than that of increasing review length, which also surpasses the influence of providing managerial response. Originality/value Unlike previous studies that primarily focus on patients’ perspectives, this paper represents one of the pioneering effects to examine physicians’ engagement in online reviews.