Opinion leaders are informal leaders who have the ability to influence others' decisions about adopting new products, practices or ideas. In the healthcare setting, the importance of translating new research evidence into practice has led to interest in understanding how opinion leaders could be used to speed this process. Despite continued interest, gaps in understanding opinion leadership rem...

Nowadays, Internet enables its users to share the information online and to interact with others. Facing with numerous information, these Internet users are confused and begin to rely on the opinion leaders’ recommendations. The online opinion leaders are the individuals who have professional knowledge, who utilize the online channels to spread word-of-mouth information and who can affect the a...

Information technology adoption is a critical continuing challenge in healthcare. This paper presents a Bayesian learning model to quantify social learning effects on information technology adoption by physicians from a community health system. The model estimates confirm that both self-learning and social learning effects reduce the uncertainty around the perceived value of a new information t...

BACKGROUND Health professionals' behaviour is a key component in compliance with evidence-based recommendations. Opinion leaders are an oft-used method of influencing such behaviours in implementation studies, but reliably and cost effectively identifying them is not straightforward. Survey and questionnaire based data collection methods have potential and carefully chosen items can - in theory...

Senior Editor: Steven Shugan The role of opinion leaders in the diffusion of innovation has recently come under scrutiny: On the one hand, their central role in accelerating diffusion has been recognized in industry, academia, and the popular media. On the other hand, it has been argued that opinion leaders do not create contagion processes that differ significantly from those of other types of...

What are the sources of opinion leadership? Do opinion leaders seek informational media, and if so, how do they consume it? Are opinion leaders active in civic life, or is it that those who are active think of themselves as opinion leaders? Is opinion leadership a cause or a consequence of political efficacy? To answer these questions, we use data from two large national surveys: a cross-sectio...

Opinion leaders play a major role in shaping potential customers’ minds in word-of-mouth communities. Prior research on opinion leaders in word-of-mouth communities has focused mostly on structural characteristics of social networks of the leaders, ignoring the predictive potential of the actual text that they write. We argue that textual characteristics of reviews, along with reviewer characte...

BACKGROUND A significant gap has been documented between best practice and the actual practice of surgery. Our group identified that colorectal cancer staging in Ontario was suboptimal and subsequently developed a knowledge translation strategy using the principles of social marketing and the influence of expert and local opinion leaders for colorectal cancer. METHODS/DESIGN Opinion leaders w...