Abstract: Online health communities provide a platform for users to exchange health knowledge without the restriction of time and space and with visible communication content, even if they do not know each other at all. Health knowledge adoption is the ultimate goal of online users’ health knowledge behavior. In this paper, we collect answers from the “one disease and multiple questions” service and the data from doctors’ homepage on WeDoctor, regard doctors’ answers as health knowledge, and investigate users’ health knowledge adoption based on the dimensions of message transparency and network translucency from the perspective of communication visibility. The length of answers and herding factors that characterize message transparency are positively correlated with health knowledge adoption; and doctor title, number of consultations, and number of followers that representing the network translucency are positively correlated with health knowledge adoption; while number of reviews and appointments are negatively correlated with health knowledge adoption. These findings help to extend the application scenarios of communication visibility and provide suggestions for the operation and management of online health communities.

Key words: Online health communities, Health knowledge adoption, Communication visibility, Herd factor, Health knowledge users