The Impact of Internet Health Information on Patient Compliance: A Research Model and an Empirical Study

Patients are increasingly seeking and using online health information to more actively manage their own health in collaboration with their doctors. This trend has both positive and negative effects on the interactions between patients and their doctors. It is therefore important to understand the impact that the increasing use of online health information has on the patient-physician relationship and patients' adherence to treatment regimens. This study examines the impact of patients' use of online health information on various elements characterising patient-doctor interactions. A survey of 225 participants was used to validate the model using various statistical techniques. The study revealed that both patient-physician concordance and perceived information asymmetry have a significant impact on patient adherence, with patient-physician concordance showing a much stronger relationship. Furthermore, both physician quality and online health information quality had a significant impact on patient-doctor compliance, with physician quality showing a much stronger relationship. Finally, only doctor quality was found to have a significant effect on perceived information asymmetry, whereas online health information quality had no effect on perceived information asymmetry. In conclusion, this study showed that physicians can remain reassured about their concerns regarding patients' use of online health information, as physician quality has the greatest impact on patients' and their physicians' agreement about their medical situation and recommended treatment regimen, as well as patient compliance. The results also indicate that patient-physician agreement on the medical situation and treatment is significantly more important for adherence to recommendations than the perceived information gap between patient and physician (i.e. Physician having a higher level of information compared to the patient) . Additionally, the level of agreement between patient and doctor on the medical situation is more dependent on the perceived quality of the doctor than on the perceived quality of the health information used on the Internet. This study showed that only the perceived quality of the doctor is significantly related to the perceived information gap between the patient and his or her doctor, while the quality of health information on the Internet is not related to this perceived information gap.