Background: Health information can be more easily transmitted and diffused through the Internet, but questionable online health information often misinforms patients. Physicians have a duty to inform patients how to achieve positive health outcomes. Many physicians often write blogs to provide patients with the right health information. However, most articles available on this subject only describe the blog phenomena without providing a theoretical background and an empirical analysis of doctors using blogs.
Methods: This study based on social cognitive theory (SCT) explores the factors influencing physicians' intention of continuously blogging. A total of 887 physician bloggers were invited to participate in an online survey and 128 valid responses were received.
Results: The SCT was proven to be useful in explaining 36.8% of the variation in physicians' continuous intention to blog.
Conclusions: We provide references for platform developers with different strategies to motivate doctors to blog, and the implications and limitations of this study are discussed.
Keywords: blogging; physicians; social cognitive theory.