EXPRESS: Bridging the Gap: The Impact of Online Booking of Healthcare Appointments Service

Online healthcare communities (OHCs) play an important role in transforming healthcare delivery. While existing literature has primarily focused on the impact of teleconsultation services on offline demand, the influence of integrating offline access into OHCs on teleconsultation remains largely unexplored. This study addresses the gap by investigating how the integration of offline access into OHCs affects the utilization of teleconsultation services. We leverage a natural experiment in an OHC involving the implementation of the Online Booking of Healthcare Appointments (OBHA) feature, which allows patients to secure in-person visit appointments in the OHC. Using difference-in-differences (DID) models, we find a significant increase in new demand for adopter physicians’ teleconsultation services following the integration of OBHA, without deterioration in service quality. Notably, the increased demand largely comes from patients in remote and underserved areas seeking consultations with high-quality physicians, exhibiting a cascading effect. Furthermore, we find that OBHA adoption extends the geographic reach of physicians’ teleconsultation services and promotes a more equitable distribution of teleconsultation utilization across regions. Our findings indicate that integrating offline access into OHCs not only boosts the utilization of teleconsultation services but also helps reduce health disparities by facilitating access to high-quality resources. This study contributes to the literature on healthcare operations management, healthcare information technology, and health disparities. The insights gleaned from the study also offer practical suggestions to policymakers, OHC operators, physicians, and patients.