Waiting Online versus In-Person: An Empirical Study on Outpatient Clinic Visit Incompletion
Video
Team Information
Team Members
Jimmy Qin, PhD Candidate, Decision, Risk, and Operations, Columbia Business School
Faculty Advisors:
Carri Chan, Professor of Business, Decision, Risk, and Operations, Columbia Business School
Jing Dong, Regina Pitaro Associate Professor of Business, Decision, Risk, and Operations, Columbia Business School
Abstract
The adoption of online services, such as telemedicine, has increased rapidly over the last few years. To better manage online services and effectively integrate them with in-person services, we need to better understand customer behaviors under the two service modalities. Utilizing data from two large internal medicine outpatient clinics, we take an empirical approach to study service incompletion for in-person and telemedicine appointments respectively. We focus on estimating the causal effect of physician availability on service incompletion. When physicians are unavailable, patients may be more likely to leave without being seen. We introduce a multivariate probit model with instrumental variables to handle estimation challenges due to endogeneity, sample selection, and measurement error. Our estimation results show that intra-day delay increases the telemedicine service incompletion rate by 7.40%, but it does not have a significant effect on the in-person service incompletion rate. This suggests that telemedicine patients may leave without being seen when delayed, while in-person patients are not sensitive to intra-day delay. We conduct counterfactual experiments to optimize the intra-day sequencing rule when having both telemedicine and in-person patients. Our analysis indicates that not correctly differentiating the types of incompletions due to intra-day delays from no-show can lead to highly suboptimal patient sequencing decisions.
Team Lead Contact
Jimmy Qin: qq2127@columbia.edu
