Publication Type
PhD Dissertation
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
4-2025
Abstract
Despite the growing prevalence of IT-enabled applications and interventions, online healthcare platforms (OHPs) face notable challenges in addressing technological and informational barriers, maintaining patient and physician engagement, and ensuring quality of care. To address these challenges, this dissertation examines the impact of IT-enabled services in OHPs across key stages of the healthcare service process—preconsultation, consultation, and postconsultation.
In the preconsultation stage, we scrutinize the effects of online preconsultation from both physician and patient perspectives. The findings reveal that preconsultation, significantly increases the consultation physician’s response speed,support abundance, and informational support. However, because emotional support is the primary driver of patient satisfaction, these service improvements do not translate into higher patient satisfaction. After controlling for service delivery outcomes, preconsultation directly decreases patient satisfaction due to perceived delay in accessing the consultation physician.
During the consultation stage, we examine the effect of online service reviews on physician performance. The results show that online service reviews incentivize physicians to improve their response speed and informational support, but not emotional support. This improvement is driven by positive online service reviews instead of negative ones. Furthermore, providing online service reviews leads to decreased physician performance in a patient’s subsequent consultations.
In the postconsultation stage, we scrutinize how adopting online follow-ups affects a physician’s offline appointments and online consultations via the platform. The results show that adopting online follow-ups leads to more offline appointments primarily through physical integration and more online consultations through informational integration. More importantly, our patient-level analyses show that after a physician adopts online follow-ups, new patients are more likely to choose the physician’s offline services. However, experiencing online follow-ups encourages existing patients to use more online services and fewer offline services provided by the same physician, suggesting that online follow-ups instill an increased preference for the online channel among repeated patients.
Keywords
healthcare innovation, online healthcare platforms, preconsultation, online follow-up, online service reviews
Degree Awarded
PhD in Information Systems
Discipline
Health Information Technology
Supervisor(s)
TANG, Qian
First Page
1
Last Page
145
Publisher
Singapore Management University
City or Country
Singapore
Citation
ZHAO, Anqi.
IT-enabled services in online healthcare platforms. (2025). 1-145.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/688
Copyright Owner and License
Author
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.