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. 2021 May 13;18(10):5192. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18105192

Table 1.

Variables’ measurements.

Variable Symbol, Description and Measurement Mean Std. Min. Max.
Dependent variable
E-consultation choice
Patient quantity Quantity–number of patients consulted a physician online in the last 6-months (logarithmic value). 145.78 543.17 0 15,459
Patient satisfaction Satisfied–the ratio of satisfied patients to all patients (Original data) 0.11 0.15 0.04 0.21
Independent variable
Online reputation
Review volume Volume–number of reviews for a particular physician (Logarithmic value). 34.39 17.23 1 123
Rating score Heat–voting heat for the physician, evaluated by patients (Ordinal) 4.41 0.55 1 4.59
Offline reputation
Professional title CTitle–physician clinical title (Dummy: 1–medical doctor/0–otherwise) 0.91 0.49 0 1
Elite education Education–physician graduated from top-50 medical school (Dummy: 1–yes/0–no) 0.31 0.11 0 1
Tenure Experience–physician experience (in years) (Logarithmic value) 16.89 5.31 1 51
Board certification Certification–physician board certification (Dummy: 1–yes/0–no) 0.88 0.21 0 1
Online effort
Blogs Blogs–the number of blogs initiated by a physician (Logarithmic value) 3.31 21.2 0 27
Scientific articles Articles–the number of articles published by a physician (Logarithmic value) 0.12 10.11 0 47
Replies Replies–the number of replies to patients by physician 5.6 113.2 0 47
Reply length Length–number of words in a reply (Logarithmic value) 16.45 9.21 39.21 98.72
Moderator
Disease risk Risk–measured as disease mortality (Dummy: 1–high-risk disease/0–otherwise) 0.77 0.123 0 1
Control variables
City rank Rank–city rank where the physician works. A scale of 1–3 is used, with 1 being the lowest and 3 the highest (Ordinal). 2.55 0.04 1 3
Specialty expertise Phy_Exp–the number of diseases that the physician is good at curing (Logarithmic value). 52.41 31.12 1 13
New patients New–whether the physician accepts new patients or not (Dummy: 1–yes/0–no). 0.87 0.12 0 1