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In the United States, 80% of adults searched online for health information (Kantar Health, 2019). Consumers not only search for general health information but also search for health information about their physicians. In the United States, 39% of patients and 53% of physicians report using a physician rating website (PRW) (Holliday, Kachalia, Meyer, & Sequist, 2017). Also, not all physicians are rated on PRWs. A systematic review reports that in the United States, PRW ratings vary by specialty with overall 66% of physicians being rated while some specialties such as Cardiology have 96% rated (Hong, Liang, Radcliff, Wigfall, & Street, 2019).
Awareness of PRWs is less than awareness of rating websites for other consumer goods and non-health care providers (Hanauer, Zheng, Singer, Gebremarian, & Davis, 2014). PRWs differ from hotel rating websites where consumers who use PRWs more often trust physician provided content and assume some level of physician quality competence as compared to consumers having less trust for hotel management rating content where consumers do not necessarily assume that the hotel has acceptable quality (Rothenfluh, Germeni, & Schulz, 2016). Content often present on PRWs include overall rating, written comments, and physician demographics (Lagu, Hannon, Rothberg, & Lindenauer, 2010). Slightly more than half of PRWs include reviewer registration of providing e-mail address information in order to submit a review (Lagu et al., 2010).
There are three broad areas of research for PRWs of physician characteristics, health outcomes, and consumer variables. There are studies on ratings on PRWs and the lack of association with physician characteristics such as sex, specialty, or practice type (Riemer, Doctor, & Dellavalle, 2016; Trehan, DeFrancesco, Nguyen, Charalel, & Daluiski, 2016). There are conflicting findings for health outcomes where some report ratings on PRWs are not associated with increased mortality (Okike, Peter-Bibb, Xie, & Okike, 2016) and not associated with physician performance (Daskivich, Houman, Fuller, Black, Kim, & Spiegel, 2018) while one study reports lower ratings of physicians on PRWs are associated with increased mortality (Lu & Rui, 2018). There are also studies on consumer use of PRWs that include consumer awareness (Galizzi, Miraldo, Stavropoulou et al., 2012), consumer valuing as important (Hanauer et al., 2014), and consumer use (Terlutter, Bidmon, & Rotti, 2014). There appears to be only two studies on consumer use of PRWs and whether content on the PRW influences consumers to use or not use a physician (Burkle & Keegan, 2015; Emmert, Meier, Pisch & Sander, 2013a). These two studies do not include a number of potentially relevant consumer variables that may help explain their association with PRWs influencing whether to use or not use a physician.
The main research question of this paper is to study these potentially relevant consumer variables of demographics, health, PRW, and trust and their association with PRWs influencing whether to use or not use a physician. We chose these variables as not all demographic and health topics have been fully studied for their association with PRWs influencing whether to use or not use a physician. There are many aspects of the PRW experience that have not been studied for their association with PRWs influencing whether to use or not use a physician. Trust has been studied for other areas of e-commerce and it is likely to be influential for understanding consumer healthcare for their association with PRWs influencing whether to use or not use a physician. We also include theory of planned behavior variables as predictor variables since the theory of planned behavior has been used to understand behavior change in many contexts.