The Mediation Path from Participating to the Web Community to the Intention to Purchase: How Trust Develops in The Healthcare Context

Managing the relationship with healthcare service providers and users has become a crucial factor for private medical centers. The increasingly size of the private initiative in supporting or substituting public supply of medical services calls for the understanding of the choices of the service users. New technologies allow medical centers the possibility to design a web-community in which individuals interact and exchange information with other peer and with professionals. In this paper, we empirically support that participation to a MC’s blog is motivated by different benefits expected and results in a customer engagement that, in turn, develops into trust toward the web platform. Importantly, blog trust translates into MC’s trust determining, in the end, intentions to purchase medical services by the company. This causal sequence is articulated in a fully mediated relationship from the value expected by blog participation to behavioral intentions showing that the MC should manage the interactions within the web platform and the customers’ engagement as determinants of a relevant form of attachment to the company, namely trust. We also find that a personal disposition toward seeking or providing opinions on the web does not affect this relationship.