Date of Award

9-3-2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Discipline

Business

First Advisor

Prof. LIANG Li Ping

Second Advisor

Prof. NIU Ben

Abstract

The increased demand for Online Medical Consultation (OMC) services has accelerated the development of Online Medical Consultation Platforms (OMCPs). OMCPs are third-party digital platforms on which patients can access medical consultation services with comparatively less effort and lower cost, while physicians can expand their service coverage and benefit financially from the provision of paid OMC services in their spare time. Although OMCPs have attracted a growing interest in academia, the role of various decision-making behaviors of physicians on these platforms on their patients and themselves remains unclear. To fill this research gap, we conduct two empirical studies based on proprietary datasets from a prominent OMCP to investigate the impacts of physicians' online operations management strategies and provide decision supports for enhancing patient satisfaction and demand for physicians in OMCP settings.

The first study aims to understand the impact of response times in different stages of an OMC service process on patient satisfaction. Specifically, it builds on signaling theory to investigate the joint effect of positive and negative signals that response time has on patient satisfaction. Using a transaction-level consultation service dataset from an OMCP in China, we find inverted U-shaped relationships between response times before and during the service process and two dimensions of patient satisfaction (attitude and efficacy). We also apply construal level theory to investigate the moderating effects of professional status, familiarity level, and regional affiliation, offering insights into how psychological distance factors shape the relationship between response time and patient satisfaction. Our findings demonstrate that a patient's regional affiliation and familiarity with a physician strengthen the curvature of response time-satisfaction relationship, while the physician's professional status has the opposite effect. Our findings provide decision support for managing response time and enhancing service quality in OMCP settings.

The second study aims to understand the impact of service flexibility on OMC demand. Building on prior research regarding transaction cost, the study considers three types of technology-enabled service flexibilities and investigates their roles in bolstering OMC demand as well as the moderating influences of physician- and market-related factors. To validate our hypotheses, we conduct regression analysis on a proprietary dataset from a prominent OMCP. Owing to four-way interactions derived from analysis, we employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify how configurations of service flexibility types and physician- and market-related factors lead to high and low levels of OMC demand. Findings from this study contribute to the e-healthcare operations literature by not only attesting to the importance of service flexibility in boosting OMC demand, but also uncovering configurations among service options, service providers, and market factors in determining the level of OMC demand outcome.

Keywords

online medical consultation platform, e-healthcare operation, response time, service flexibility, patient satisfaction, demand

Language

English

Recommended Citation

Zhang, J. (2025). Essays on operational issues of online medical consultation platforms (Doctoral thesis, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/otd/247/

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