Valuing Your Patient’s Opinion: Online Patient Reviews and Power Distance
Online consumer reviews have had an undeniable impact on the way businesses manage their interactions with customers and adapt their operations to feedback (Banerjee et al., 2017). The majority of consumers influenced by online reviews has created a noticeable shift in the way business owners manage expectations and respond to consumer feedback (Sargeant et al., 2008). Online reviews have also shown a significant impact in the field of healthcare. According to Review Trackers (2018), 84% of patients refer to review sites to find a physician. There has been a large body of evidence in literature that online patient reviews (OPR) can predict outcomes of a healthcare provider and can serve as a potentially valuable but inexpensive antecedent for quality of care in healthcare settings (Bardach et al., 2013; Holliday et al., 2017a; Lagu et al., 2019).
This research focuses on the provider’s perspective on helpfulness of online reviews in the context of the healthcare environment. The popularity of online consumer reviews suggests that these data may have downstream effects on healthcare providers. The authors want to explore the underlying social psychological mechanisms that drive a physician’s perception about a review’s helpfulness and approach the question of online review efficacy from the side of the service provider rather than the consumer.
In order to understand why an OPR is influential for a physician, it is not sufficient to study the source of the review (Ghose & Ipeirotis, 2010) but it is also necessary to study the reader’s interpretation of the review itself (Huang et al., 2011). It has been noted that the effect of online reviews depends on their characteristics. Within the healthcare literature, characteristics of online reviews have focused on the source of the review and patient awareness of quality reporting (He et al., 2022). Similar to the broader online review literature, most of the focus is placed on the consumer-patient side of online reviews (Anhang Price et al., 2014; G. Gao et al., 2012; Hanauer et al., 2014). In an exploration of the interpersonal context of online reviews, a study documented in Hernández-Ortega (2018) examines the role of social psychological distance that explains the receiver’s perception of review credibility and subsequent reviewer behavior in reaction to individual reviews. The authors focus specifically on the construct of social psychological distance explored in the paper and relate it to the relationship between patients and physicians. Furthermore, they operationalize the construct of social psychological distance to that of power distance in examining the physician-patient relationship as it relates to perception of OPRs and physician valuation of online reviews.
This paper aims to study whether the power distance perceived by the physician when evaluating an OPR is an underlying mechanism that influences the relationship between review characteristics and the physician’s perception about the helpfulness of the review. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the following research question:
Using the theoretical lens of construal level theory (Trope et al., 2007) grounding power distance (Farh et al., 2007), and social-psychological distance constructs, this paper provides two contributions to the literature of online patient reviews. First, the authors examine the phenomenon of online reviews within the healthcare space. While this cross-section of literature is not completely unexplored, there is opportunity for more advancement and analysis of the physicians’ perspective as the body of literature mainly focuses on the patients’ perspective. The second contribution is the application of social-psychological distance to the space of online reviews and the use of power distance as an operationalization of the construct mediating the effect between reviewer characteristics and perception of a review. Figure 1 positions this work built on top of the model proposed by Hernández-Ortega (2018). The main difference between this work and Hernández-Ortega (2018) is that the authors study the provider’s response as opposed to consumers’ perception.
Figure 1. Contribution space of this study
The rest of this paper is organized in the following way: The next section proposes the hypotheses tested in this study based on the supported literature; following this, the authors present their research methodology. The next section provides the results of the present study, and the authors then discuss their research findings and conclusion.