Time：2023.5.12（Friday）14:00-16:00
Venue：Room 220, Building 2, Songjiang Campus
Speaker：Tang Qian, Associate Professor, School of Computer and Information Systems, Singapore University of Management
Host: Professor Ma Baojun
Topic：Is Pre-consultation Conducted by the Assistant Physician Effective in Improving Online Healthcare Service Quality and Satisfaction?
Abstract:
To improve online healthcare quality and efficiency, online healthcare communities (OHCs) enabled the pre-consultation function, in which an assistant physician interacts with the patient to understand and document the patient’s health conditions, medical history, and consultation objectives prior to the formal online consultation with the attending physician. Using detailed service data from a Chinese OHC that tracks patients’ use of pre-consultation in their online consultations, the present study scrutinizes the effect of using pre-consultation on online healthcare service quality and satisfaction. We find that pre-consultation can increase the speed and length of the attending physician’s response, which provides the patient with more informational and emotional support. Despite the improvement in service quality, pre-consultation leads to decreased patient satisfaction with the consultation service, including the attending physician’s response speed, expertise, and attitude. Furthermore, we find that pre-consultation improves service quality by enhancing the professionalism and comprehensiveness of patient case information and reducing information clarification and validation between the patient and the physician, and this effect is not affected by either the assistant physician or team characteristics. Our findings offer important guidance and implications for physicians, OHCs, and healthcare policymakers to improve online healthcare outcomes.
Guest Speaker
Tang Qian is an associate professor at the School of Computer and Information Systems at the Singapore University of Management. She obtained her doctoral degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. Her research interests include social media and social networks, online word-of-mouth, e-commerce, knowledge creation, online medical analysis, and more. Her paper has been published in top international journals such as Information Systems Research (ISR), Production and Operations Management (POM), and Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS).
