The differential effects of online content on healthcare adoption: Hierarchical modelling

Abstract

With increasing interest in health, the medical tourism market has become more important than ever. This study was to analyze the factors of consumer keywords used online search in healthcare. To this end, we based the amount of searches on the text mining by Google. We used hierarchical modeling to categorize consumer’s adoption of healthcare. The findings are as follows: First, medical tourism has positive effects on various categories of travel, health, beauty, social, and other categories as well. In particular, it is found that its impact on travel category was greater than the other categories and its impact on the social category was important as well among the online consumers. Second, the categories of healthcare, finance, business, government have positive effect on healthcare adoption. This study was intended to contribute to finding out consumer behavior patterns in healthcare industry using big data. In conclusion, it’s suggested that adoption strategy should be used differently according to the type of its content, in order to diffuse medial tourism. ? 2005 ? ongoing JATIT & LLS.