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Why Does Interactional Unfairness Matter for Patient-Doctor Relationship Quality in Online Health Consultation? The Contingencies of Professional Seniority and Disease Severity

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Smart Health (ICSH 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10983))

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Abstract

The development of online health platforms in recent years has drawn significant research attention to understanding patient participation. However, the unfairness in patient–doctor relationship development has been largely overlooked in the online health context. This study proposes and tests a model that examines how interactional unfairness (encompassing interpersonal unfairness and informational unfairness) influences online patient–doctor relationship quality and the contingent conditions of a doctor’s professional seniority and disease severity on the unfairness–relationship quality link. Using objective data with 31,521 observations from a leading online health platform, this study employed rare-event logistic regression to test the model. The results show that interpersonal unfairness and informational unfairness have negative and positive effects on relationship quality, respectively, and a doctor’s professional seniority and disease severity moderate the strength of the unfairness-relationship quality link. This study advances the knowledge of interactional unfairness in online health, and provides practical insights for online healthcare stakeholders into how to manage unfairness and consider the contingent factors to improve patient–doctor relationship in online health consultations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nankai University, Tianjin, 30071, China

    Xiaofei Zhang

  2. Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Xitong Guo

  3. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong SAR

    Kee-hung Lai

  4. Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Yi Wu

Authors
  1. Xiaofei Zhang
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  2. Xitong Guo
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  3. Kee-hung Lai
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  4. Yi Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yi Wu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Hsinchun Chen

  2. Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Qing Fang

  3. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Daniel Zeng

  4. Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Jiang Wu

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Zhang, X., Guo, X., Lai, Kh., Wu, Y. (2018). Why Does Interactional Unfairness Matter for Patient-Doctor Relationship Quality in Online Health Consultation? The Contingencies of Professional Seniority and Disease Severity. In: Chen, H., Fang, Q., Zeng, D., Wu, J. (eds) Smart Health. ICSH 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10983. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03649-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03649-2_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03648-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03649-2

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