Exploring the Social Influence of Multichannel Access in an Online Health Community

Social influence has a great impact on human behavior, which has been widely investigated in various research fields. Even so, it has rarely been investigated in the online health community. In this paper, we focus on the multichannel access in online health communities, defining social influence as the average degree of multichannel access to a physician's colleagues. Based on the multinomial logistic regression model, we examined the direct effects of social influence and patients' rating to multichannel access. In addition, we explored the moderating effect of social influence on the relationship between patients' rating and multichannel access in online health communities. The results of the experiment and robustness testing support the propositions that social influence and patients' rating significantly and positively affect multichannel access in an online health community. The moderating effect of social influence is negative and significantly influences the accessible channels provided by the focal physician. This research contributes to the literature concerning online health communities, social influence, and multichannel access; it also has practical implications.