Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2016

Abstract

Online healthcare service has gradually become a significant part of healthcare services, especially in emerging economy with shortage in medical resources and wide coverage in the Internet usage. This paper studies how health insurance policies affect the demand for online healthcare consultation by using longitudinal online healthcare and offline medical services datasets of a major city in China. The two policies we study are the integration of health insurance systems in urban and rural regions and the integration of health insurance systems between pairwise-cities. The empirical results show that both policies significantly affected the demand for online consultation. Our study is among the pioneering efforts examining the impact of health insurance policy on the demand for online healthcare services, in particular, the relocation of demand for medical services resulted from the integration of health insurance systems between rural and urban areas and across cities. It also provides an innovative angle to gauge the macro-level impact of medical insurance policy on the change and shift of medical service demand across channels and regions. This impact is difficult to detect in the past due to the disconnected hospital information systems and inconsistent medical insurance systems across hospitals and regions.

Keywords

Medical Insurance Policy, Online Healthcare Service, Medical Service

Discipline

Asian Studies | Computer Sciences | Insurance | Medicine and Health Sciences

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

PACIS 2016: Proceedings of the 20th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, Chaiyi, Taiwan, June 27-July 1

First Page

1

Last Page

13

Publisher

AIS

City or Country

Atlanta, GA

Additional URL

http://aisel.aisnet.org/pacis2016/387

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