Patient Decision and Experience in the Multi-channel Appointment Context: An Empirical Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Long waiting time for treatment in the outpatient department has long been a complaint and influence patient experience. It is critical to schedule patients for doctors to reduce patient waiting time. Nowadays, the multi-channel appointment has been provided for patients to get medical services, especially for ones with severe illnesses and remote distance. OBJECTIVE Under the multi-channel appointment context, the determinants of patients’ appointment decision and experience become more complicated and are needed to be investigated. METHODS From the point of patient, this paper uses a real operation dataset (1,241 doctors from 119 departments, involving 308,085 patients) from a tertiary hospital in China to investigate the antecedents and consequence of patients’ appointment decision. RESULTS Our results show that a patient with online appointment decision has a shorter consultation waiting time compared with a patient with on-site appointment. High-quality resource demand, high-severity disease, and high non-disease costs create an obvious incentive for patients to make appointments via the Internet. Further, only the effect of non-disease cost on channel choice is lower for patients with multiple visit histories. CONCLUSIONS This study produces several insights, which have implications for channel choice and patient behavior literature. More importantly, these insights as a whole, contribute to the design of appointment systems of hospitals.