报告题目：Operational Efficiency in Telemedicine: A Driver of Subsequent Patient Visits

时间：2024年12月12日（周四）上午10:00-11:30

地点：主楼317房间

报告人：彭小松  

报告人简介：

Xiaosong (David) Peng is professor and associate dean and holds dean’s chair professorship in the College of Business, Lehigh University. Professor Peng completed his doctoral degree in Operations Management from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in information systems management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Professor Peng’s research interests are in operations and supply chain strategy, service and manufacturing technology management, healthcare operations management, and empirical research methods. Professor Peng’s research has appeared in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Journal of Supply Chain Management, among others. He is currently department editor for Journal of Operations Management, senior editor for Production and Operations Management, and associate editor for Decision Sciences Journal and Journal of Supply Chain Management.

内容简介：

Telemedicine has emerged as a transformative solution to address the challenges of delivering equitable, cost-effective, and efficient healthcare services within modern healthcare systems. This study aims to explore the relationship between operational efficiency in telemedicine and subsequent online and offline patient visits. We collected data from the text-based telemedicine platform affiliated with a top-ranked hospital system in Southern China. Our final dataset contains 54, 004 patient consultation records spanning from February 2021 to April 2024, including both online and offline consultation records. Our offline consultation records include both inpatient and outpatient visits. We have three measures for operational efficiency in telemedicine: patients’ waiting time, doctors’ average response intervals, and the standard deviations (SD) of the response intervals. Our results show that, when the waiting time for the focal online consultation increases by one hour, the odds of patients seeking subsequent offline visits in the next 30 days decreases by 2.1%. When the average response interval increases by one hour, the associated decrease in the odds for subsequent online consultation, outpatient visits, and inpatient visits are 2.7%, 4.4% and 4.0%, respectively. Lastly, when the SD of response intervals increases by one hour, the probability of subsequent offline visits decreases by 1.2%. We further consider whether the subsequent visits are with the same doctor and for the same disease and obtain consistent results. Our findings reveal that higher operational efficiency in telemedicine significantly increases the likelihood of patients seeking subsequent online and offline visits, demonstrating its role in enhancing patient engagement and care continuity. This highlights the complementary nature of telemedicine and traditional healthcare, with efficient systems fostering trust, accessibility, and sustained utilization across care channels.