Is Pre-consultation Conducted by the Assistant Physician Effective in Improving Online Healthcare Service Quality and Satisfaction?

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, this study scrutinizes the effect of using pre-consultation on online healthcare service quality and satisfaction. The results show that pre-consultation can significantly increase the attending physician’s response speed, length, and the level of informational support embedded within the response, while maintaining a consistent level of emotional support. Despite the improvement in service quality, pre-consultation leads to decreased patient satisfaction with the consultation service. Furthermore, we find that pre-consultation improves service quality by enhancing the professionalism and comprehensiveness of patient case information and reducing information seeking and clarification of the attending physician with the patient

Investigating the impact of social support embedded in online consultation on physicians’ online reputation: The moderating role of media capabilities

The importance of physicians’ online reputation (POR) has been recognized in the healthcare consultation process. However, few studies provide physicians with practical advice that help them improve their online reputation. Drawing on the taxonomy of social support and media synchronicity theory, this study proposes a theoretical model to study the relationship between physicians’ computer-mediated social support (CMSS) and POR, and the moderating effect of media capabilities on above relationships. This study collects online consultation records from a leading Chinese online consultation platform and employs the long short-term memory (LSTM) model to extract measurements of two types of CMSS. Our finding suggests that physicians’ action-facilitating support and nurturant support have significant positive impacts on POR. Furthermore, physicians’ communication frequency and communication depth strengthen the relationship between physicians’ action-facilitating support and POR. Readability strengthens the relationship between social support and POR. This study provides implications on how physicians can improve their online reputation

Social networks : the future for health care delivery

With the rapid growth of online social networking for health, health care systems are experiencing an inescapable increase in complexity. This is not necessarily a drawback; self-organising, adaptive networks could become central to future health care delivery. This paper considers whether social networks composed of patients and their social circles can compete with, or complement, professional networks in assembling health-related information of value for improving health and health care. Using the framework of analysis of a two-sided network – patients and providers – with multiple platforms for interaction, we argue that the structure and dynamics of such a network has implications for future health care. Patients are using social networking to access and contribute health information. Among those living with chronic illness and disability and engaging with social networks, there is considerable expertise in assessing, combining and exploiting information. Social networking is providing a new landscape for patients to assemble health information, relatively free from the constraints of traditional health care. However, health information from social networks currently complements traditional sources rather than substituting for them. Networking among health care provider organisations is enabling greater exploitation of health information for health care planning. The platforms of interaction are also changing. Patient-doctor encounters are now more permeable to influence from social networks and professional networks. Diffuse and temporary platforms of interaction enable discourse between patients and professionals, and include platforms controlled by patients. We argue that social networking has the potential to change patterns of health inequalities and access to health care, alter the stability of health care provision and lead to a reformulation of the role of health professionals. Further research is needed to understand how network structure combined with its dynamics will affect the flow of information and potentially the allocation of health care resources

Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a review of the state of the art in OR/MS

We provide a structured overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a review of relevant OR/MS articles for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making

Optimal Pricing Strategy for Multichannel Healthcare Services

As a combination of online and offline channel services, multichannel healthcare services currently play important roles in helping consumers solve their health problems. In this study, we establish a stylized model to investigate how healthcare service providers should price in multi-channels and when consumers should choose online service, taking misdiagnosis rate and the severity of disease problems into account. Our results show that the prices of the online channel and offline channel can increase when the misdiagnosis rate is low and minor problem inspection rate online is high. Moreover, when the diagnosis rate is high, the profit of online channel would increase, and then improve the profit of multichannel services. These findings provide insights for the theoretical research of online healthcare services and practice management on pricing strategies in multichannel healthcare services

With Help from Afar: Cross-Local Communication in an Online COVID-19 Pandemic Community

Crisis informatics research has examined geographically bounded crises, such as natural or man-made disasters, identifying the critical role of local and hyper-local information focused on one geographic area in crisis communication. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an understudied kind of crisis that simultaneously hits locales across the globe, engendering an emergent form of crisis communication, which we term cross-local communication. Cross-local communication is the exchange of crisis information between geographically dispersed locales to facilitate local crisis response. To unpack this notion, we present a qualitative study of an online migrant community of overseas Taiwanese who supported fellow Taiwanese from afar. We detail four distinctive types of cross-local communication: situational updates, risk communication, medical consultation, and coordination. We discuss how the current pandemic situation brings new understandings to crisis informatics and online health community literature, and what role digital technologies could play in supporting cross-local communication

Transformative effects of social media:How patients’ use of social media affects roles and relationships in healthcare

Social media have started changing the way that many industries work. However, there is a lack of understanding of these changes, particularly in the context of healthcare, which is known for high information asymmetry between healthcare providers and patients, and authoritative relationships. Yet, the high proliferation of social media in healthcare enables patients to easily communicate with one another, exchanging informational and emotional support. However, it remains unclear how social media is used by patients, how it affects their behavior, their identities and their relationships with healthcare providers. We conduct a literature review and four empirical studies. First, we conduct a systematic literature review on patients’ use of social media and effects of such use. Second, we explore patients’ use of various categories of social media and propose a taxonomy of interactions enabled by social media in healthcare. Third, we explore how the use of social media by two chronic disease patient communities changes their behaviors and identities as well as their relationships with their healthcare providers. Fourth, we explore how healthcare providers’ interactions with patients who use social media change those providers’ occupational identity. Finally, we test to what extent, and through which mechanism, patients’ use of social media changes their relationships with healthcare providers. Taken together, these findings provide a new explanation of the developing role of social media in changing - and strengthening - organization-customer relationships

Transformative effects of social media:How patients’ use of social media affects roles and relationships in healthcare

Social media have started changing the way that many industries work. However, there is a lack of understanding of these changes, particularly in the context of healthcare, which is known for high information asymmetry between healthcare providers and patients, and authoritative relationships. Yet, the high proliferation of social media in healthcare enables patients to easily communicate with one another, exchanging informational and emotional support. However, it remains unclear how social media is used by patients, how it affects their behavior, their identities and their relationships with healthcare providers. We conduct a literature review and four empirical studies. First, we conduct a systematic literature review on patients’ use of social media and effects of such use. Second, we explore patients’ use of various categories of social media and propose a taxonomy of interactions enabled by social media in healthcare. Third, we explore how the use of social media by two chronic disease patient communities changes their behaviors and identities as well as their relationships with their healthcare providers. Fourth, we explore how healthcare providers’ interactions with patients who use social media change those providers’ occupational identity. Finally, we test to what extent, and through which mechanism, patients’ use of social media changes their relationships with healthcare providers. Taken together, these findings provide a new explanation of the developing role of social media in changing - and strengthening - organization-customer relationships

Smart Healthcare solutions in China and Europe, an international business perspective

The thesis is part of the Marie Curie Fellowship project addressing health related challenges with IoT solutions. The author tries to address the challenge for the implementation of telehealth solutions by finding out the demand of the telehealth solution in selected European economies and in China (chapter 1), analyzing the emerging business models for telehealth solution ecosystems in China (chapter 2), how to integrate telehealth solutions with institutional stakeholders (chapter 3) and why are elderly users willing to use telehealth solutions in China. Chapter 1 and chapter 2 form the theoretical background for empirical work in chapter 3 and chapter 4. The thesis addressed four research questions, namely “Which societal and social-economics unmet needs that Internet of Healthcare Things can help to resolve?”, “What are the business model innovation for tech companies in China for the smart health industry?”, “What are the facilitators and hurdles for implementing telehealth solutions”, “Are elderly users willing to use telehealth solutions in China?”. Both qualitative study and quantitative analysis has been made based on data collected by in depth interviews with stakeholders, focus group study work with urban and rural residents in China. The digital platform framework was used in chapter 2 as the theoretical framework where as the stakeholder power mapping framework was used in chapter 3. The discretion choice experiment was used in chapter 4 to design questionnaire study while ordered logit regression was used to analyze the data. Telehealth solutions have great potential to fill in the gap for lack of community healthcare and ensuring health continuity between home care setting, community healthcare and hospitals. There is strong demand for such solutions if they can prove the medical value in managing chronic disease by raising health awareness and lowering health risks by changing the patients’ lifestyle. Analyzing how to realize the value for preventive healthcare by proving the health-economic value of digital health solutions (telehealth solutions) is the focus of research. There remain hurdles to build trust for telehealth solutions and the use of AI in healthcare. Next step of research can also be extended to addressing such challenges by analyzing how to improve the transparency of algorithms by disclosing the data source, and how the algorithms were built. Further research can be done on data interoperability between the EHR systems and telehealth solutions. The medical value of telehealth solutions can improve if doctors could interpret data collected from telehealth solutions; furthermore, if doctors could make diagnosis and provide treatment, adjust healthcare management plans based on such data, telehealth solutions then can be included in insurance packages, making them more accessible