Topic: Bridging the Gap: A Natural Experiment with Online Appointment Booking of Healthcare Services
Speaker: HE Liuyi，Doctoral Candidate,Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Host: Xuefeng Zhao，Professor, Assistant Dean
Time and Date: 15:00-17:00.7 Mar 2023
Location: SOM 121
Abstract:Disparities in health care are found everywhere, reflecting biases in society. Accessing high-quality healthcare resources is important to improve health outcomes. Online access to healthcare services has the potential to facilitate patients’ access to healthcare resources, but its effects on marginalized segments of the population are unclear. This study uses a difference-in-differences method that leverages quasi-experimental variations in the implementation of online booking of healthcare service appointments (OBHA) in a Chinese online health community. We found that the program increased overall patients’ demand for online consultations, and this effect was stronger among nonlocal patients in lower-tier cities. Interestingly, our heterogeneous treatment effect models indicate an intensified Matthew effect, i.e., physicians affiliated with hospitals in top-tier cities or with prestigious professional titles see the greatest increase in online visits after adopting OBHA. Therefore, the social values brought by the program were constrained by the working load of popular physicians and had to be weighed against the harm from the increased concentration of service provision.
Speaker’s Profile: Liuyi He obtained her bachelor's degree from the School of Mathematics and Statistics of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Information, Technology, and Innovation at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests include user-generated content, online healthcare, and online crowdfunding. Currently, she has an article accepted by MIS Quarterly (first author), another article undergoing the second round of revision at Information Systems Research, and a third article under review at Management Science.
