ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1629272
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Information for Patient Education, Volume IIView all 6 articles
Physician Professional Motivation and Online Knowledge Sharing for Patient Education: A Perspective of Motivation Theory
Provisionally accepted
- 1Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, Tianjin, China
- 2Hubei Provincial Corps Hospital, Chinese People’s Armed Police Forces, Wuhan, China
- 3Wuhan Third Hospital (Tongren Hospital of Wuhan University), Wuhan, China
- 4Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
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Aims: Drawing on motivation theory, this study aims to investigate the effect of professional motivation on online knowledge sharing for patient education with considering the contingencies of online experience and offline expertise.Methods: Based on a panel dataset comprising 11,839 physicians with 24,389 physician-month observations selected from one of leading online health platforms in China, this study conducted the fixed hierarchical regression model to test the direct and moderating effects.The results show that professional motivation positively affects online knowledge-sharing quantity and quality. Meanwhile, online experience enhances the positive effects of professional motivation on the above two dimensions of online knowledge sharing. In addition, offline expertise hinders the benefits of professional motivation to online knowledge-sharing quantity.This study makes contributions to the literatures of motivation theory, online knowledge sharing, online and offline contexts on online health platforms, and provides implications for physicians and platform managers.
Keywords: Professional motivation, online knowledge sharing, Online experience, offline expertise, Patient Education
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 18 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huang, Guo, Wen and Fan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Qihui Fan, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
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