Online Health Communities (OHCs) are a crucial practice in “Internet + Healthcare” and play a significant role in enabling patients to actively manage their health. Despite the flourishing commercial activity in OHCs, frequent reports of substantial losses and user complaints have raised doubts about their value among both researchers and practitioners. What are the characteristics of OHCs, and how do they affect patients’ perceived value? This study aims to address these gaps. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we incorporated health knowledge seeking and emotional support obtaining to describe the patients’ utilization of OHC resources, and chose disease severity, privacy concerns, and e-health literacy to describe OHC patients’ individual characteristics. Based on prior studies, we proposed eight hypotheses, collected data via online survey, and verified the hypothesized model via structural modeling equation (SEM) based on 305 valid samples. As the empirical results show, patients perceived value of OHCs sources from the health-related resources in OHCs. Both health knowledge seeking and emotional support obtaining directly influence user perceived value of OHCs. Patients’ individual characteristics moderates the impacts of health knowledge seeking and emotional support obtaining. Specifically, disease severity undermines the impact of health knowledge seeking but enhances the impact of emotional support obtaining. Privacy concerns undermines the impacts of health knowledge seeking, while e-health literacy enhances the impact of health knowledge seeking. These findings advance our understanding of user perceived value of OHCs and also offer insights into OHCs user management and operation.