Physicians' Social Media Use and In-hospital Service Quality : An Empirical Investigation

Health social media enables physicians to reach out directly to their patients. However, in spite of the potential value of this technology, empirical evidence on the effect of physicians' social media use is limited. In this study, we propose the questions: Can physicians' use of health social media improve their in-hospital service quality? And if so, what are the underlying mechanisms behind such an effect? To study these questions, we assemble a novel dataset that combines physicians' social media adoption data with their 237,100 patient care records from a large hospital in China. We analyze the data by using the propensity score matching method in combination with the difference-in-difference technique and find that physicians' social media use has a positive impact on their in-hospital service quality in term of increasing patients' chance to recover and reducing patient readmission. The contributions and future work of this study are also discussed.