Valuing Your Patient's Opinion: Online Patient Reviews and Power Distance.

Online reviews have a continuing impact across all industries. Even industries with highly skilled workers are affected by online reviews, despite large gaps in experience and skill between reviewers and reviewees. The authors conducted a study amongst physicians in Nevada and China to measure the perception of online patient reviews from the perspective of healthcare providers to explore whether this skill gap affected the perception of online reviews. The authors distributed and collected survey responses from over 200 physicians and used structural equation modeling techniques to evaluate the relationships. These findings show that physician perception of online patient reviews is partially mediated by power distance, direct effects exist between the relationships identified in our model, and that cross-cultural effects are present between physician responses across Nevada and China. This study expands the existing work in the field of review evaluations by operationalizing social-psychological distance into the construct of power distance within the context of healthcare.