In September 2017, the eHealth Research Institute made a major breakthrough in ‘online health-care publication. With the instruction of Professor Doug Vogel and Professor Xitong Guo, Shanshan Guo, a member of our institute (and jointly with Yulin Fang, a teacher from CityU) published this article ‘How Doctors Gain social and Economic Returns in Online Health-Care Communities: A Professional Capital Perceptive’ in JMIS, one of the top IS journals.

    The article focuses on the prevailing parties in Online Health-Care Communities(OHCs). Taking the professional capital of doctors as a renewable resource which can be exchanged, and analyzing the motivation of social returns and economic returns (such as consultations incomes, virtual gifts, thank-you letters and votes for doctors’participation in OHCs), the article discusses the reasons for OHC participation. In the research, two major problems have been addressed. One is the factors which determine the social and economic returns of participating doctors in an OHC and the other is the heterogeneity in the professional capital exchange process. To obtain the data, the author crawled public data, composed of 3,233 regular hospitals and 303,367 doctors from the Good Doctor (www.haodf.com), the largest OHC in China, in October, 2013, using network spiders. The author also eliminated data noise and deleted non-conformity data before analyzing.

          To investigate exchange heterogeneity, the article divided the social and economic returns that come from doctors’social exchange into four combinations, high social and high economic returns, high social and low economic returns, low social and low economic returns, low social and high economic returns, as exhibited in a two-dimensional quadrant model. Least squares regression was used to estimate the model. Multiple-group regression, quadrant distribution and the grouped regression approach based on dependent variables were used to examine the main effects and interaction effects. The final results suggest that all hypotheses have been significantly supported, other than H1C, the interaction effect between status capital and decisional capital, which is partially supported. 

          The research shows that professional capital has significant influence on social and economic returns of doctors in OHCs and demonstrates the complementary relationship between voluntary exchanges and doctors’status capital on economic returns for doctors with low social capital, which means that doctors with low social capital may get more economic returns through voluntary exchange. Lastly, the article points out that instead of an economic exchange process, an online health-care community is a social exchange process.