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To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine

Despite its efficiency in reducing the impact of pandemics (e.g., the COVID-19), whether to introduce telemedicine as an additional way to serve chronically ill patients remains controversial for hospitals in many countries. This paper builds a stylized model to investigate a hospital’s telemedicine...

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Autores principales: Zhou, Cuihua, Hao, Yifei, Lan, Yanfei, Li, Weifeng
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier B.V. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8683093/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34955589
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2021.12.020
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author Zhou, Cuihua
Hao, Yifei
Lan, Yanfei
Li, Weifeng
author_facet Zhou, Cuihua
Hao, Yifei
Lan, Yanfei
Li, Weifeng
author_sort Zhou, Cuihua
collection PubMed
description Despite its efficiency in reducing the impact of pandemics (e.g., the COVID-19), whether to introduce telemedicine as an additional way to serve chronically ill patients remains controversial for hospitals in many countries. This paper builds a stylized model to investigate a hospital’s telemedicine strategy and the corresponding impacts on its operations regarding outpatient management of chronic diseases. We implement our analysis from three key concerns of the hospital in the presence of a pandemic: the differences in medical consumption and reimbursement between in-person and telemedicine modalities and the effort cost of infection reduction resulting from the pandemic. We find that in the absence of the pandemic, the hospital prefers to introduce telemedicine when the differences in medical consumption and reimbursement are both small. In the presence of the pandemic, we find that the introduction of telemedicine does not always benefit the hospital and that it is better not to introduce telemedicine in some cases since it may exacerbate the negative influence of the pandemic on the hospital’s total costs. Furthermore, we surprisingly find that the hospital may set greater in-person capacity but less telemedicine capacity in response to the outbreak of the pandemic under certain conditions, which contradicts public beliefs. Finally, we show that social welfare can be improved by introducing telemedicine when the effort cost of infection reduction and the difference in reimbursement are both of moderate size. The condition under which social welfare is improved tightens with a greater difference in medical consumption.
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spelling pubmed-86830932021-12-20 To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine Zhou, Cuihua Hao, Yifei Lan, Yanfei Li, Weifeng Eur J Oper Res Article Despite its efficiency in reducing the impact of pandemics (e.g., the COVID-19), whether to introduce telemedicine as an additional way to serve chronically ill patients remains controversial for hospitals in many countries. This paper builds a stylized model to investigate a hospital’s telemedicine strategy and the corresponding impacts on its operations regarding outpatient management of chronic diseases. We implement our analysis from three key concerns of the hospital in the presence of a pandemic: the differences in medical consumption and reimbursement between in-person and telemedicine modalities and the effort cost of infection reduction resulting from the pandemic. We find that in the absence of the pandemic, the hospital prefers to introduce telemedicine when the differences in medical consumption and reimbursement are both small. In the presence of the pandemic, we find that the introduction of telemedicine does not always benefit the hospital and that it is better not to introduce telemedicine in some cases since it may exacerbate the negative influence of the pandemic on the hospital’s total costs. Furthermore, we surprisingly find that the hospital may set greater in-person capacity but less telemedicine capacity in response to the outbreak of the pandemic under certain conditions, which contradicts public beliefs. Finally, we show that social welfare can be improved by introducing telemedicine when the effort cost of infection reduction and the difference in reimbursement are both of moderate size. The condition under which social welfare is improved tightens with a greater difference in medical consumption. Elsevier B.V. 2023-01-01 2021-12-16 /pmc/articles/PMC8683093/ /pubmed/34955589 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2021.12.020 Text en © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Zhou, Cuihua
Hao, Yifei
Lan, Yanfei
Li, Weifeng
To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine
title To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine
title_full To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine
title_fullStr To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine
title_full_unstemmed To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine
title_short To introduce or not? Strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine
title_sort to introduce or not? strategic analysis of hospital operations with telemedicine
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8683093/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34955589
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2021.12.020
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