Patient's decision and experience in the multi-channel appointment context: An empirical study

Background

Long waiting time for treatment in the outpatient department has long been a complaint and has influenced patient's experience. It is critical to schedule patients for doctors to reduce patient's waiting time. Nowadays, multi-channel appointment has been provided for patients to get medical services, especially for those with severe illnesses and remote distance. This study aims to explore the factors that influence patient appointment channel choice in the context of multi-channel appointments, and how channel choice affects the waiting time for offline visiting.

Methods

We collected outpatient appointment records from both online and offline appointment channels to conduct our empirical research. The empirical analysis is conducted in two steps. We first analyze the relationship between appointment channel choice and patient's waiting time and then the relationships between three determinants and appointment channel choice. The ordinary least squares and the logistic regression model are used to obtain the empirical results.

Results

Our results show that a patient with an online appointment decision has a shorter consultation waiting time compared with a patient with on-site appointment (β = −0.320, p < 0.001). High-quality resource demand (β = 0.349, p < 0.001), high-severity disease (β = 0.011, p < 0.001), and high non-disease costs (β = 0.039, p < 0.001) create an obvious incentive for patients to make appointments via the Internet. Further, only the effect of non-disease cost on channel choice is lower for patients with multiple visit histories (β = −0.021, p < 0.001).

Conclusions

Our study confirms the effect of Internet use on reducing patient's waiting time. Patients consider both health-related risk factors and cost-related risk factors to make decisions on appointment channels. Our study produces several insights, which have implications for channel choice and patient's behavior literature. More importantly, these insights contribute to the design of appointment systems in hospitals.

Art of breaking bad news: A qualitative study in Indian healthcare perspective

BACKGROUND

Health-care communication is essential for amiable provider-recipient relationship. This study explored various health-care experiences and expectations of service recipients and providers in private clinical establishments of West Bengal, India, while breaking difficult news, bad news, and death.

AIM

The current study was framed with the following research question: What are the varying perceptions, experiences, and expectations of healthcare recipients and their providers while seeking/delivering support in situations of breaking bad news and communications on death?

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The data were collected through individual in-depth interviews-31 respondents that included 16 patients and their families (recipient) and 15 medical practitioners (provider). Inductive thematic analysis was used.

RESULTS

Three main themes and nine sub-themes were identified highlighting livid experiences and perceptions of respondents. The findings suggest that interpersonal communications involve language barriers, health literacy and COVID-19 pandemic, situations of sudden unexplained death, perceptual negativity surrounding healthcare, empathy as well as emotions and multiple affiliations leading to ethical moral conflicts to influence individual perception. Regarding treatment attributes, factors of inaccessibility misconceived as incompetence and waiting and contact time are involved. The behavior and personality dimensions include attitude and robustness of the patient party and capability to handle emotions that affect provider-recipient relationship during communications of bad news and death.

CONCLUSION

This study provided a local perspective about the experiences and expectations of healthcare recipients and their providers. Understanding this critical realm shall help in bridging the gap between recipient expectations and provider practices. It will also attempt towards possible alignment to improve patient satisfaction.