The Impact of Geographic and Social Proximity on Physicians: Evidence from the Adoption of an Online Health Community

Despite the increasing popularity of telehealth, the diffusion of online health communities lags behind because of the limited physician participation. The low adoption levels of telehealth could be attributed to the social environment rather than a baseline reluctance to adopt. By utilizing a panel data set of physicians’ adoption over eight years, we empirically investigate the impacts of geographically and socially close adopters and examined the interaction of proximity influences and competition in adoption. Our results suggest that positive effects of both geographic and social proximity influence on adoption when local competition among physicians on OHCs is low. The positive impact of socially close prior adopters increases with local competition, whereas that of geographically close prior adopters decreases with local competition. Therefore, online health communities could leverage proximity influence by incorporating information cues such as the cumulative adoption rates of close peers to facilitate physician adoption. However, the framing of information cues should consider interactions of competition and proximity influence. Platform managers need to balance the direct crowding-in effect of competition and the adverse moderating effect by which it diminishes the influence of geographic proximity, especially for low-title physicians. For high-title physicians, who are more independent, emphasize the usefulness of online platforms.