Strategic Resource Allocation in Dual-Channel Healthcare Systems: The Role of Telemedicine in Physician Assignment

Asynchronous telemedicine offers flexibility and accessibility to address the problem of insufficient and unevenly distributed healthcare resources. However, hospitals lack managerial guidance for resource allocation decisions across online and offline services. This study considers a hospital operating both offline and online channels, which aims to achieve economic objectives through channel capacity allocation and workload distribution between working- and after-hours. Patient medical processes are formulated as a queuing network, integrating a multi-type patient choice model. We collected related datasets from our collaborative hospital, performed simulations to validate the modeling assumptions and conducted an empirical study. Empirical results indicate that e-visits crowd out offline first-visits and substitute for offline return-visits, and the strength of the substitution effect decreases with an increase in treatment complexity. Our results suggest that increasing offline channel capacity or enhancing compensation for after-hours telemedicine services would bring a heightened preference for in-person visits during working-hours and e-visit during after-hours, which might help with economic objectives. Our analysis indicates that indiscriminate expansion of online channels may be ineffective. Instead, departmental treatment complexity should be considered, and we propose three scenario-dependent allocation strategies. This study helps hospitals make scientific decisions about developing online channels and guiding physicians’ workload allocation. Note to Practitioners—Our work focuses on improving the management of new asynchronous telemedicine, such as Internet hospitals, with a primary focus on both channel capacity planning and dual-channel workload allocation. In this paper, we propose a dual-channel queuing network model, a channel capacity allocation strategy and an adjustment rule for workload allocation. This paper provides a case study of a representative general hospital. The results by department quantify the impact of Internet hospitals on outpatient healthcare utilization, make recommendations on workload adjustment, and show how to use the modeling tools in this paper to obtain an allocation strategy for channel capacity.