Effects of multi-channel consultation on e-healthcare demand: an empirical study

Diverse e-healthcare channels have emerged with the widespread use of e-healthcare platforms. In particular, the e-healthcare platforms start to provide both graphic-text consultation and video-voice consultation channels, where providers can perform instant or non-instantaneous consultations according to the conditions of the service providers and the patients. While prior research has extensively examined the impact of e-healthcare on offline medical demand or treated online consultation as a unified channel, limited attention has been paid to how different types of online consultation channels on the e-healthcare platforms affect e-healthcare demand. This study aims to address these gaps by investigating the effects of multi-channel consultation on e-healthcare demand.

First, we consider extensive potential influencing factors. This study constructed a covariance-based structural equation model (CB-SEM) to investigate the key factors that may influence the e-healthcare demand with multi-channel consultations, including the availability of multi-channel services and prices, etc. Second, relying on the moderating method, we investigate the moderating effects of disease types and the provider's title on the demand for e-healthcare services with multi-channel consultation. The structural equation model is used for data analysis.

There were 608 data samples from service providers collected from the "Wedoctor" website. Our results reveal several findings. Firstly, the existence of either a graphic-text consultation service ([Formula: see text]) or a video-voice consultation service ([Formula: see text]) for providers increases the demand for e-healthcare services. However, the prices for either graphic-text consultation service ([Formula: see text]) or video-voice consultation service ([Formula: see text]) reduce the e-healthcare service demand. Secondly, for the graphic-text consultation service, the e-healthcare demands for the patients with chronic diseases exhibit a greater increase compared with those with acute diseases [Formula: see text]), yet this phenomenon appears insignificant for the video-voice consultation service. Thirdly, for the graphic-text consultation service type, the e-healthcare demand experiences a greater increase for providers with higher professional titles ([Formula: see text]). On the contrary, regarding the video-voice consultation service type, the e-healthcare demand increases more significantly when the professional titles of providers are low ([Formula: see text]).

Our findings offer managerial insights on service designs for e-healthcare platforms and enhance their demand by considering the possibilities of multi-channel services. These insights instruct how e-healthcare can be delivered more effectively.