Abstract: Using online health communities to manage the health conditions of patients with chronic diseases is an important approach to relieving the shortage of medical resources and improving the health outcome of such patients in the new era. However, there are inconsistent findings in the current literature about the impact of this model on patient compliance. This paper constructs a decision model on the effect of patient-doctor interaction on the compliance of patients with chronic disease based on an online health community, taking diabetic patients on a well-known online health community in China as the research object and combining the characteristics of chronic disease patients (demand levels and complications). It explores the decision-making process of people with chronic diseases from a social support theory perspective with a view to explaining the inconsistent findings in the literature. The research results show that informational support and emotional support provided by doctors in the online health community will positively affect the satisfaction of patients with chronic diseases, so as to improve their compliance through satisfaction as a mediator variable; the demand level of patients with chronic diseases has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between emotional support and satisfaction, complications have a negative moderating effect on the relationship between satisfaction and compliance. This study enriches the research on the influencing factors and conduction paths of chronic disease patients’ compliance in the online health community, and puts forward relevant practical suggestions for the online health platform to better serve chronic disease patients.

Key words: Chronic patient, Diabetes, Informational support, Emotional support, Satisfaction, Patient characteristics, Compliance