%A YAN Meng-ling, ZHANG Jia-yuan %T How Doctors' Informative-emotional Interaction Modes Impact the Satisfaction of Mobile Consultation Service: An Analysis Based on the Motivation-hygiene Theory %0 Journal Article %D 2019 %J Chinese Journal of Management Science %R 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2019.09.010 %P 108-118 %V 27 %N 9 %U {http://www.zgglkx.com/CN/abstract/article_16390.shtml} %8 2019-09-20 %X Mobile consultation service allows patients to acquire timely health guidance from doctors via mobile devices. While its rapid growth in the past owes to its advantages over traditional face-to-face consultation in convenience, high efficiency, and low cost, its future development dependents on the continuous improvement of patients' satisfaction.
Extant research on patients' satisfaction towards mobile consultation service has been focused on antecedents such as technology adoption and patients' trust, few research had paid attention to the interaction modes between patients and doctors, which is considered as a key factor for patients' satisfaction towards mobile consultation service.In fact, lacking of facial and body language, asynchronous communication, and more knowledgeable patients have posed new challenges to the interaction modes between patients and doctors in the mobile context. Besides, most literature explained the factors that lead to patients' satisfaction, but ignored the reasons that caused patients' dissatisfaction.
In order to provide a more complete understanding on the antecedences of patients' satisfaction and dissatisfaction, this work draws on the motivation-hygiene theory, and aims to answer the following two research questions:(1) What are the characteristics of the informative and emotional interaction modes of doctors in the mobile context? (2) How do these interactive modes of doctors affect patient satisfaction and dissatisfaction respectively?
Data were collected from a leading Chinese mobile medical service application, and a mixed method research was designed characterized by a qualitative study followed by a quantitative study. First, 300 out of 750 real communication records between doctors and patients were screened based on a set of predefined rules. Among them, records that were labelled by patients as "satisfied", "fair", and "dissatisfied" are evenly distributed. Then, a qualitative study based on thematic analysis coding rules was conducted to identify the sub-categories of doctors' informative and emotional interaction modes.Four categories (professional diagnosis, professional description, comfort to cure and relationship maintenance) were coded to describe doctors' interaction behaviors with 15 sub-categories in the good interaction model and 12 in the poor interaction model. Third, a quantitative study was employed to hypothesize and validate the relationships among different interaction modes and patients' satisfaction.
The findings suggest that good informative interaction mode does not leads to patient satisfaction while poor informative interaction mode lead to patient dissatisfaction, which means doctors' informative interaction mode acts as a hygiene factor to the quality of mobile consultation service. On the contrast, good emotional interaction mode leads to patient satisfaction while poor emotional interaction mode does not lead to patient dissatisfaction. Therefore, the doctor's emotional interaction mode acts as a motivation factor for patients' satisfaction.
Our work contributes to the mobile healthcare literature by drawing attention to the different antecedents of patients' satisfaction and dissatisfaction, by emphasizing the importance of the doctor-patient interaction processes in the mobile context, and by designing a mixed method based on real communication records between patients and doctors. This work offers practical guidance to improve doctors' communication behavior as well as the design of mobile healthcare applications.