Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
The medical industry has long attracted societal attention both at national and international levels. At the same time, continuous improvements in living standards and attention to health, longer life expectancy, aging population, urbanization and increases in the disease spectrum have fostered demands for medical treatment. This demand is not confined to the treatment of the disease alone; disease prevention has also become a trend. An increasing number of people require professional and reliable health guidance. Consequently, current allocation of resources for medical and health care is insufficient to match the growing demand for professional consultation in the pursuit of healthy lives. The imbalance between the supply and demand of medical services is becoming increasingly prominent. Fair and efficient allocation of medical resources is urgently required to meet the growing demand for medical treatment.
In this context, the internet has the advantage of breaching time and space constraints and providing a pioneering way to correct the imbalance of medical resource allocation through online medical consultation (OMC) platforms. In contrast to other countries that use the internet only as a supplementary resource in the medical industry, China is looking to the internet to solve current medical resource shortages. OMC platforms with health consultation as the main business, such as “chunyuyisheng.com” and “dxy.com,” have emerged. OMC has been found effective in improving medical resource allocation (Xiong and Zhao, 2017). It presents a new communication tool for doctors and patients. Patients can select a doctor on an OMC platform through a terminal device (e.g. a computer or mobile phone) and consult the doctor about health issues via text, graphics or voice calls. Similarly, doctors can reply to inquiries through the same platform (Chiu, 2016).
OMC presents a new option for people to conduct health management and consultations and has been widely used in recent years. For example, in “chunyuyisheng.com,” the average number of health consultations reached 330,000 per day in 2016 [1]. It is evident that OMC in China is growing rapidly. The role of OMC was highlighted during the outbreak of COVID-19, which is considered a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). People who want to seek medical attention but are afraid of cross-infection turn to OMC platforms. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic subsides,...