News Resource: School of Management and Economics

Editor: News Agency of BIT

Translator: Bo Yilin, News Agency of BIT

Recently, Professor Yan Zhijun's team in the School of Management and Economics has made great research progress in the field of e-Healthcare service, and his research "Effects of Online-Offline Service Integration on e-Healthcare Providers: A Quasi- Natural Experiment" was published as the lead article of the top international journal of management science Production and Operations Management in Issue 8 of 2021. The study explored the effects of online-offline service integration for the first time in the field of e-Healthcare, verifying the heterogeneous effect of online-offline service integration on different types of doctors. The research work was done by Professor Yan Zhijun's team in collaboration with Professor NiHuang from the University of Houston.

The shortage of medical resources in hospitals, overloaded workload of doctors and increased queuing time of patients and other livelihood issues have made the management of China's healthcare system face new challenges, and online medical platforms have become one of the important ways to address this challenge. In order to optimize patient service experience and improve doctors' work efficiency, online medical platforms have started to integrate their online consultation channels and offline access channels. Through the channel integration, doctors can more easily conduct online consultations, arrange offline visits, and synchronize patients' related medical records. In order to clarify the mechanism of interaction between channel integration and doctors' consultation volume and social reputation, and to provide decision-making suggestions and management support to effectively solve medical problems and relieve medical pressure, Professor Yan's team collected panel data from more than 30,000 doctors over 8 months and conducted relevant empirical study.

The study found that online-offline service integration on e-Healthcare platforms could increase doctors' online channel consultation, but cut down on doctors' offline channel consultation. Specifically, the integration of online and offline channels breaks the time and space constraints, allowing patients to consult online anytime and anywhere, thus increasing the number of online consultations by doctors. Meanwhile, for patients with less serious conditions that do not require hospital consultation, doctors provide online advice to help them recover, which in turn helps alleviate the shortage of hospital medical resources. In addition, the study also revealed the moderating effect of channel integration on doctors with different titles and different disease types, and found that channel integration positively moderates the consultation volume and social reputation of doctors with low titles and chronic diseases, suggesting that channel integration can help solve the "cold start" problem of novice doctors.

Production and Operations Management is one of the 24 top academic journals in business schools selected by the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD24) and one of the 50 top academic journals in business schools (FT50) rated by the Financial Times, enjoying a high academic reputation in the international management community. The list of UTD 24 and FT50 journals is widely recognized by universities around the world as one of the important references for business school / management school ranking, title promotion, research project and talent program evaluation.

Paper link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/poms.13381