Seminar (Dept. of Management Science and Engineering)

Title: Healthcare at the Crossroads: Impacts of Physician’s Online Health Community Participation on Offline Healthcare Accessibility, Equity, and Quality

Speaker: Ji Wu (School of Business, SUN YAT-SEN University)

Time: 10:00 am, November 9, (Wednesday), 2022

Venue: Online Meeting

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

Hospital-affiliated online health communities (OHCs) provide enormous potential for health promotion, where their benefits have largely been found to outweigh their disadvantages. Yet due to limited and slow adoption of OHCs, healthcare is at the crossroads of traditional offline and technological online care trends, as their joint application can create uncertainty or complexities for existing offline healthcare systems in terms of accessibility, equity, and quality concerns. How physicians’ offline inpatient care quality, equity, and accessibility might change after joining an OHC is worth studying, particularly for patients with low socioeconomic status who are more likely to be affected. This study seeks to quantify these effects using operation-level inpatient data and correlated physicians’ OHC activity data from a major hospital. Results show that physicians’ OHC participation improves offline care accessibility by triggering about 7.29 percent increase in new offline inpatient visits. Also, physician participation in OHCs significantly improves care quality by reducing the average inpatients’ length of stay by 0.56 days. These improvements are also found to be far more pronounced for patients with low-socioeconomic status, suggesting that OHC participation can promote the equity of offline inpatient care accessibility and quality. The study also tests how the effects of OHC participation are driven by general knowledge dissemination, physician-patient interactions, and the integration of online-offline processes. It adds to the literatures on OHC, healthcare operations management, and public health, and offers practical implications for service operations of online health platforms.