Should Doctors Open Online Consultation? An Empirical Investigation of How It Impacts the Number of Offline Appointments

Online healthcare portals have become prevalent across the world in recent years with the development of internet technology. One common form that a healthcare portal takes is the online consultation website, which provides a bridge between patients and doctors and reduces the time and cost for patients when they are seeking for healthcare services. Another type of healthcare portal is the healthcare service appointment website, which facilitates and simplifies offline-visit for patients. While nominally separate, is it possible that the behaviors of the users (including patients and doctors) on these two types of websites are related to each other? For example, how does opening the online consultation impact the offline appointment of doctors, and vice-versa? Although this is an important question for healthcare portals, doctors, and policymakers, it has not been rigorously examined in the literature. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by collecting data from the two Chinese online healthcare portals, Haodf.com and Guahao.com, which are respectively the most used websites of the above two portal-types. We first examine the overall impact of opening online consultation on offline appointments. There has been evidence of both spillover and cannibalization effects in other contexts. In the healthcare setting, our results show that the number of offline appointments for doctors increases after opening the online consultation service. Additionally, we examine the moderating effect of several factors, such as online rating (represented by recommendation heat on Haodf.com), hospital ranking, GDP, etc., on the impact of opening online consultation on the quantity of doctor’s offline appointments. Based on our results, we present several interesting and useful insights. Given that online consultation is a new but an important way to connect patients and doctors, our findings provide useful implications for all the stakeholders doctors, patients, hospitals, and policymakers.