Effect of Textual Features on the Success of Medical Crowdfunding: Model Development and Econometric Analysis from the Tencent Charity Platform

Understanding unmet medical needs through medical crowdfunding in China

OBJECTIVES

Online medical crowdfunding has gained popularity in recent years in China. The objective of this study was to identify unmet medical needs in the public healthcare system through analysis of Chinese medical crowdfunding data.

STUDY DESIGN

Text information extraction and statistical analysis based on large-scale data.

METHODS

From 19 June 2011 to 15 March 2020, data from 30,704 medical crowdfunding projects were collected from Tencent GongYi, which is one of the largest Chinese medical crowdfunding platforms. Text mining methods were used to extract data on the medical conditions and locations of the applicants of medical crowdfunding. In addition, 125 medical crowdfunding projects initiated by leukaemia patients in Chongqing and Nanyang were further investigated through manual data extraction, and the factors impacting the fundraising goals were explored using a generalised linear model.

RESULTS

The most common conditions using medical crowdfunding to raise funds were as follows: cancer (31.87%), chronic conditions (18.14%), accidental injury (7.80%) and blood system-related conditions (7.75%). Treatments for cancer and blood system-related conditions are expensive and have serious long-term impacts on the lives of patients. Results showed that the cities of Nanyang and Chongqing had the largest number of crowdfunding projects.

CONCLUSIONS

This study found that the medical conditions that prompted individuals to apply for crowdfunding were those with long treatment cycles, complexities and expensive medical or non-medical costs. Furthermore, discrepancies in health insurance policies between different regions and residents seeking treatments outside their insurance locations were also important factors that triggered medical crowdfunding applications. Adjusting health insurance policies accordingly may improve the efficiency of utilising health insurance resources and reduce the financial burden on patients.

An overview of Fintech applications to solve the puzzle of health care funding: state-of-the-art in medical crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is emerging as an alternative form of funding for medical purposes, with capital being raised directly from a broader and more diverse audience of investors. In this paper, we have systematically researched and reviewed the literature on medical crowdfunding to determine how crowdfunding connects with the health care industry. The health care industry has been struggling to develop sustainable research and business models for economic systems and investors alike, especially in pharmaceuticals. The research results have revealed a wealth of evidence concerning the way crowdfunding is applied in real life. Patients and caregivers utilize web platform-based campaigns all over the world to fund their medical expenses, generally on a spot basis, using donation-based or even reward-based schemes, regardless of the health care system archetype (public, private insurance-based or hybrid). Academics have also focused on funding campaigns and the predictors of success (which range from social behaviour and environment to the basic demographics of the campaigners and their diseases) and on social and regulatory concerns, including heightened social inequality and stigma. While equity crowdfunding is disrupting the way many ventures/businesses seek capital in the market, our research indicates that there are no relevant or consistent data on the practice of medical equity crowdfunding in health care, apart from a few anecdotal cases.

Analysis of text factors impacting donation behavior in public welfare crowdfunding projects

BACKGROUND: The textual description of a public service crowdfunding project is an important factor influencing the audience’s donation behavior, but the existing studies on the textual characteristics of the project are rather scattered. OBJECTIVE: This paper attempts to systematically sort out the characteristics of project texts along the lines of linguistic and non-linguistic factors, clarifying the relationship between the characteristics of project texts, project sources, and social donation behavior. METHODS: Based on Aristotle’s persuasion theory, language factors are measured from three dimensions of appeal to personality, appeal to logic, and appeal to emotion, while other text features unrelated to persuasive language are classified as non-language factors. When discussing the influence path of linguistic and non-linguistic factors on donation behavior, this paper controls the project type to test the moderating role played by the identity characteristics of crowdfunding initiators. RESULTS: The results show that the use of personality-based language (third-person words), logic-based language (money words and quantitative words), and emotion-based language (tone of voice and negative emotions) all have a significant positive effect on the audience’s donation behavior, while the use of second-person words in personality-based language has a negative effect on donation behavior; the identity of the project initiator (project origin) plays a complex and diverse moderating role in the influence of project text features on donation behavior. CONCLUSION: There are obvious differences in the description of different text strategies adopted by the project initiator.

Factors Influencing Donation Intention to Personal Medical Crowdfunding Projects Appearing on MSNS

This purpose of this study is to develop a research model by extending the theory of planned behavior in a new application context, and applies it to investigate the extrinsic factors influencing people’s attitude towards donating to medical crowdfunding projects appearing on mobile social networking sites (MSNS) and their intention to donate. A survey of 356 Chinese users was conducted and structural equation modeling was used to validate the proposed model and hypotheses. The results indicate that project information, retweeter information and MSNS information all have the significant effect on the general attitude towards donating to medical crowdfunding projects, and general attitude positively affects people’s donation intention. In addition, perceived behavioral control also has positive effect on people’s donation intention, while experienced donating to medical crowdfunding projects has negative effect on people’s donation intention. The research findings provide important theoretical and practical implications.

Factors influencing the prescription pattern of essential medicines from the perspectives of general practitioners and patients: a qualitative study in China

OBJECTIVES

This qualitative study aimed to explore the factors influencing the prescription patterns of essential medicines (EMs) from the perspectives of general practitioners (GPs) and patients in Beijing, China.

DESIGN

The qualitative study was conducted using individual in-depth interviews.

SETTING

This study was conducted from January to August 2020, in community health service centres (CHSCs) across six urban districts of Beijing, China.

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 17 GPs from 17 CHSCs in 6 urban districts and 22 patients with non-communicable diseases from three CHSCs in the three urban districts of Beijing were recruited using the purposive sampling method and a three-stage sampling strategy, respectively.

RESULTS

Five major themes were identified among factors influencing the prescription pattern of EMs: (1) efficacy and safety of medicines, (2) prescription recommendations from physicians in tertiary or secondary hospitals, (3) patients' medication preference, (4) financial status of patients and (5) minimum requirement for the prescription of EMs.

CONCLUSION

The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the factors influencing the prescription patterns and utilisation of EMs from the perspectives of GPs and patients, respectively. Policymakers should implement policies and measures to promote the National Essential Medicines System in China.

Predicting the Success of Internet Social Welfare Crowdfunding Based on Text Information

This study explored how the success of project crowdfunding can be predicted based on the texts of Internet social welfare crowdfunding projects. Through a calculation of the quantity of information and a mining of the sentimental value of the text, how the text information of the interconnected social welfare crowdfunding project affects the success of the project was studied. To this aim, a sentimental dictionary of Chinese Internet social welfare crowdfunding texts was constructed, and information entropy was used to calculate the quantity of information in the text. It was found that, compared with the information presented in the text, the fundraiser’s social network factors are key in improving the success of fundraising. The sentimental value of the text positively affects the success of fundraising, while the influence of the quantity of information is represented as an inverted, U-shaped relationship. The non-ideal R-squared indices reflected that the multiple linear regression models do not perform well regarding this prediction. Furthermore, this paper validated and analyzed the prediction efficiency of four machine-learning models, including a multiple regression model, a decision tree regression model, a random forest regression model, and an AdaBoost regression model, and the AdaBoost regressor showed the best efficiency, with an accuracy R2 of up to 97.7%. This study provides methods for the quantified processing of information contained in social welfare crowdfunding texts, as well as effective prediction on social welfare crowdfunding, and also seeks to raise the success rate of crowdfunding and thus features commercial and social value.

Medical Crowdfunding Campaign Sharing Behaviour on Mobile Social Media

This study explores factors influencing the sharing behaviour of medical crowdfunding campaigns on mobile social media regarding retweeter and retweeted text features from the social influence perspective and verifies the moderating effect of potential supporter donations. Two scenario-based surveys of medical crowdfunding users are conducted in China. The first (524 samples) and second (510 samples) surveys emphasize scenarios without and with retweeted text, respectively. These surveys are tested by PLS-SEM and suggest that the credibility of retweeters and the strength of their relationship with supporters can positively promote potential supporters' sharing behaviour, regardless of whether retweeters provide retweeted text. Three features of retweeted text significantly influence medical crowdfunding sharing behaviour. Retweeted text can promote sharing behaviour among individuals. With retweeted text available, if potential supporters donate before sharing the campaign, then the influences of retweeter and retweeted text features can be increased.