Previously submitted to: JMIR Medical Informatics (no longer under consideration since Dec 04, 2021)
Date Submitted: Jul 9, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Patient Decision and Experience in the Multi-channel Appointment Context
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.
Citation
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Copyright
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