An empirical study of the impact of medical skills description of doctors on Online Healthcare Inquiry users' trust

Abstract

Online Healthcare Inquiry (OHI) is an increasingly popular area in medical activities. It is designed to provide convenience and information for users' medical decision-making. However, through our pre survey, we found that many users asserted that the effects of OHI were limited and they often consulted more than one doctors for a specific problem due to their low trust in the skills of doctors. In this work, according to the social recognized theory, we explored the impacts of antecedent variables of trust, different levels of doctors' medical skills description (Level of CTE medical skills description: hospital classification, title of doctors and healing efficacy) on users' trust The results supported our hypotheses that the more detailed information the OHI providers represented, the more trust OHI users will have. The findings not only presented interesting implications for OHI design but also offered an opportunity to increase the OHI's influence on users' medical decision-making.