Background: An OHC online health community (OHC) is an interactive platform for virtual communication between patients and physicians. Patients can typically search, seek, and share their experience and rate physicians, who may be involved in giving advice. Some OHC providers provide incentives in form of honorary titles to encourage the web-based involvement of physicians, but it is unclear whether the award of honorary titles has an impact on their consultation volume in an OHC. Objective: This study is designed to identify the differential treatment effect of the incentive policy on the service volumes for the subgroups of treatment and control in an OHC. This study aims to answer the following questions: Does an honorary title for physicians impact their service volumes in an OHC? During the period of discontinuity, can we identify the sharp effect of the incentive award on the outcomes of physicians’ service volumes? Methods: We acquired the targeted samples based on treatment, namely, physicians with an honorary title or not and outcomes measured before and after the award of the 2 subgroups. A regression discontinuity design was applied to investigate the impact of the honorary titles incentive as a treatment in an OHC. There was a sharply discontinuous effect of treatment on physicians’ online health service performance. The experimental data set consisted of 346 physicians in the treatment group (with honorary titles). Applying the propensity score matching method, the same size of physicians (n=346) was matched and selected as the control group. Results: A sharp discontinuity was found at the time of the physician receiving the honorary title. The results showed that the parametric estimates of the coefficient were significantly positively (P<.001) associated with monthly home page views. The jump in the monthly volumes of home page views was much sharper than that of the monthly consultations. Conclusions: The changes in the volumes of monthly consultations and home page views reflect the differential treatment effect of honorary titles on physicians’ service volumes. The effect of the incentive policy with honorary titles is objectively estimated from both the perspective of online and offline medical services in an OHC. Being named with honorary titles significantly multiplied monthly home page views, yet it did not significantly impact monthly consultations. This may be because consultation capacity is limited by the physician's schedule for consultations.

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) use data analytics to provide critical information to aid physicians' decision-making. With timely access to data considered crucial in effective healthcare delivery, CDSS are vital for improving healthcare outcomes. Nevertheless, physician satisfaction is key to their adoption. Previous studies on the adoption of CDSS by physicians have focused on their system-related structures, however there is a lack of research on system identity. This study aims to fill this important gap by integrating the theories of Task-Technology Fit (TTF) and IT identity into a research model that explains physicians' satisfaction with CDSS. To validate the model, data was collected from 349 Chinese physicians who use CDSS in clinical practice via an online questionnaire. The study's findings demonstrate that TTF positively influences CDSS identity. CDSS identity not only impacts physician satisfaction directly but also serves as a mediator in the influence of TTF on their satisfaction. Moreover, Computer Self-Efficacy (CSE) was found to act as a negative moderator between TTF and CDSS identity, indicating that higher levels of CSE weaken the impact of TTF on CDSS identity. This study extends current understanding on physician satisfaction with CDSS by integrating IT identity with TTF in Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) research. This integration contributes to the more effective application of CDSS in healthcare settings.

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is an extremely malignant cancer with poor survival. H2AFY gene encodes for a variant of H2A histone, and it has been found to be dysregulated in various tumors. However, the clinical value, biological functions and correlations with immune infiltration of H2AFY in HCC remain unclear.Methods: We analyzed the expression and clinical significance of H2AFY in HCC using multiple databases, including Oncomine, HCCDB, TCGA, ICGC, and so on. The genetic alterations of H2AFY were analyzed by cBioPortal and COSMIC databases. Co-expression networks of H2AFY and its regulators were investigated by LinkedOmics. The correlations between H2AFY and tumor immune infiltration were explored using TIMER, TISIDB databases, and CIBERSORT method. Finally, H2AFY was knocked down with shRNA lentiviruses in HCC cell lines for functional assays in vitro.Results: H2AFY expression was upregulated in the HCC tissues and cells. Kaplan–Meier and Cox regression analyses revealed that high H2AFY expression was an independent prognostic factor for poor survival in HCC patients. Functional network analysis indicated that H2AFY and its co-expressed genes regulates cell cycle, mitosis, spliceosome and chromatin assembly through pathways involving many cancer-related kinases and E2F family. Furthermore, we observed significant correlations between H2AFY expression and immune infiltration in HCC. H2AFY knockdown suppressed the cell proliferation and migration, promoted cycle arrest, and apoptosis of HCC cells in vitro.Conclusion: Our study revealed that H2AFY is a potential biomarker for unfavorable prognosis and correlates with immune infiltration in HCC.

BACKGROUND An OHC online health community (OHC) is an interactive platform for virtual communication between patients and physicians. Patients can typically search, seek, and share their experience and rate physicians, who may be involved in giving advice. Some OHC providers provide incentives in form of honorary titles to encourage the web-based involvement of physicians, but it is unclear whether the award of honorary titles has an impact on their consultation volume in an OHC. OBJECTIVE This study is designed to identify the differential treatment effect of the incentive policy on the service volumes for the subgroups of treatment and control in an OHC. This study aims to answer the following questions: Does an honorary title for physicians impact their service volumes in an OHC? During the period of discontinuity, can we identify the sharp effect of the incentive award on the outcomes of physicians’ service volumes? METHODS We acquired the targeted samples based on treatment, namely, physicians with an honorary title or not and outcomes measured before and after the award of the 2 subgroups. A regression discontinuity design was applied to investigate the impact of the honorary titles incentive as a treatment in an OHC. There was a sharply discontinuous effect of treatment on physicians’ online health service performance. The experimental data set consisted of 346 physicians in the treatment group (with honorary titles). Applying the propensity score matching method, the same size of physicians (n=346) was matched and selected as the control group. RESULTS A sharp discontinuity was found at the time of the physician receiving the honorary title. The results showed that the parametric estimates of the coefficient were significantly positively (P<.001) associated with monthly home page views. The jump in the monthly volumes of home page views was much sharper than that of the monthly consultations. CONCLUSIONS The changes in the volumes of monthly consultations and home page views reflect the differential treatment effect of honorary titles on physicians’ service volumes. The effect of the incentive policy with honorary titles is objectively estimated from both the perspective of online and offline medical services in an OHC. Being named with honorary titles significantly multiplied monthly home page views, yet it did not significantly impact monthly consultations. This may be because consultation capacity is limited by the physician's schedule for consultations.

Continuous monitoring in A/B testing is widely used for selecting options, variants, or treatments in healthcare analytics. However, the appropriate stopping strategy for A/B testing in continuous monitoring remains unclear. This study proposes a Bayesian A/B testing method for continuous monitoring, incorporating a Martingale stopping strategy. A uniform Beta distribution is used as the prior in the Bayesian A/B testing method. The posterior expected loss is employed as the criterion for choosing an option. When the posterior expected loss falls below a preset threshold, the result of the continuous monitoring is accepted for the A/B testing.With the proposed method, continuous monitoring of the null hypothesis (that the conversion rate of A is less than that of B) is managed using the posterior expected loss. The results obtained using the Martingale stopping strategy enhance the interpretability of the A/B testing process. Finally, the effectiveness of the Bayesian A/B testing method is validated through numerical experiments on both simulated data and real-world applications.