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Global health care spending is expected to grow at an annual rate of 5.4% from 2018 to 2022, a significant increase from the 2.9% during 2013-2017 (Deloitte, 2019). Personal health care spending is also expected to continue to grow substantially, reaching $11,674 in the United States in 2022 (Deloitte, 2019). However, not everyone can enjoy good medical support services, such as medical insurance and government subsidies, to help them pay for these expenses. An estimated 97 million people worldwide fell into poverty in 2010 due to out-of-pocket medical expenses (WHO, 2018). In this context, online fundraising for medical expenses, also known as medical crowdfunding, has begun to appear and develop rapidly. Patients and their family members can solicit donations from others on medical crowdfunding platforms to raise unaffordable treatment costs. In the United States, GoFundMe, a popular medical crowdfunding platform, raised about $1.6 million from 8,000 projects related to medical expenses, raising $150 million from 600,000 projects in 2014 (Snyder, 2016). In China, Shuidichou.cn has successfully provided free fundraising services for more than 800,000 seriously ill patients with financial difficulties, with a total fundraising amount of more than 16 billion RMB (Shuidichou, 2019). In addition, medical crowdfunding platforms such as Qschou.com and Axzchou.com have also grown rapidly in China. In the future, medical crowdfunding is expected to show a sustained annual growth rate of 25% (Simon 2016).
With the rapid development of mobile Internet, many medical crowdfunding platforms have begun to turn their attention to mobile social networking sites (MSNS) such as Facebook, WeChat and Weibo. Through MSNS, users can not only connect with others, but also share crowdfunding projects to receive donations from others. As a result, many mobile users are receiving more and more requests to donate to medical crowdfunding projects on MSNS. Unlike charitable donations projects, initiated by charitable organizations or non-profit organizations, medical crowdfunding projects are mostly initiated by family members or friends of patients, which are defined as personal medical crowdfunding projects in this study.
However, many personal medical crowdfunding projects are far short of their targets, leading to a low success rate of crowdfunding (Jin, 2019). For example, analyzing 200 medical crowdfunding projects on the GoFundMe platform, Berlinerhe and Kenworthy (2017) found that only 10% of the projects achieved their fundraising goals. A statistical study of 143,917 medical crowdfunding projects on the Qschou.com showed that only 7% of the projects successfully raised the target amount (Guo et al., 2019). Therefore, an important research question is what factors affect users’ intention to donate to personal medical crowdfunding projects appearing on MSNS.
Past research on online donation has investigated the factors that influence people’s intention to donate online (Treiblmaier and Pollach, 2006; Shier and Handy, 2012; Reddick and Ponomariov, 2012; Mejova et al., 2014). Some studies also have examined the attitude towards donation via social network site (Kim and Lee, 2014; Sura et al., 2017). However, most of these studies focus on online donation behavior towards charitable or non-profit organizations, ignoring individual requests for help. In the context of online crowdfunding, existing research has focus mostly on financial crowdfunding project (Gerber and Hui, 2014; Zheng et al., 2014; Lin and Viswanathan, 2016; Lukkarinen et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2017). However, there are very limited studies in the available literature on donation intention to personal medical crowdfunding projects. Unlike online donations, medical crowdfunding information spread through MSNS includes not only those provided by MSNS account owners, but also those created by MSNS members. Therefore, we can’t determine whether the factors that influence the donation intention to online donation and online crowdfunding also apply to the medical crowdfunding context.