Patient empowerment in an online health platform: Exploring the quadratic effects of patients’ conscious-competence on perceived health status

The way in which online health platforms link the process and outcome of patient empowerment has not been fully explored in the literature. Drawing on a conscious-competence perspective, this paper identifies health consciousness and health information competence to characterize patient empowerment in the online healthcare context, and it theorizes the process and outcome of patient empowerment in a nonlinear model using the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) paradigm. An empirical study was conducted to examine the proposed theoretical relationships and model based on survey data collected from 376 respondents involved with an online health platform. The findings show that: (1) health consciousness and health information competence can be used to characterize, as two critical dependent dimensions, patient empowerment in online health platforms, and they can both be derived from online information support; (2) there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between health consciousness and perceived health status; and (3) there is a U-shaped relationship between health information competence and perceived health status. These findings add new knowledge to the literature on patient empowerment, suggesting that healthcare practitioners should avoid one-size-fits-all approaches to empowering patients. This study also contributes to the S-O-R model by exploring a situation where the organism has a quadratic effect on the response.