Enhancing Doctor Performance on Online Health Platforms: The Role of Service Diversity and Differentiation in Patient Choice

Amidst growing competition on evolving online health platforms, enhancing patient choice and doctor performance is increasingly crucial. This paper aims to explore the influence of service diversity and differentiation in doctor services on patient choice. After collecting data from the platform “HaoDF” and processing the data to screen for outliers, negative binomial regression was utilized for stepwise regression analysis, in which the moderating effects of the degrees of internal and external competition are also considered. The results show that service diversity, service differentiation and their interaction term all have a significant effect on patient’s choice positively, with the degrees of internal and external competition enhancing their impacts. This study highlights that for doctors on online platforms, diversifying and differentiating services is key to attracting patients and outperforming in competitive settings, providing an important practical reference for doctors and online health platforms to attract more patients and maximize economic benefits.