Should Doctors Open Online Consultation Services? An Empirical Investigation of Their Impact on Offline Appointments

Online healthcare portals have become prevalent worldwide in recent years. One common formof a healthcare portal is the online consultation website, which provides a bridge between patients and doctors and reduces patients' time and cost when seeking healthcare services. Another form is the healthcare service appointment website, which facilitates offline visits for patients. Although nominally separate, the behaviors of the users (including patients and doctors) on these two types of websites could be related to each other. In particular, how does opening online consultation services impact the offline appointments of doctors? Although this is an important question for healthcare portals, doctors, and policy makers, it has not been rigorously examined in the literature. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this important gap by examining the overall impact of offering online consultations on offline appointments. Our results show that the number of offline appointments for doctors increases after opening an online consultation service. Additionally, we examine how several factors, such as recommendation heat, hospital ranking, and doctor title, moderate the impact of opening online consultation services on doctors' offline appointments. Given that online consultation is a new but important way to connect patients and doctors, our findings provide useful implications for all the stakeholdersdoctors, patients, hospitals, and policy makers-regarding how to integrate online and offline channels in the healthcare context.