Managing multichannel healthcare delivery during epidemics

Abstract:  Motivated by telemedicine’s infection risk elimination potential during epidemics, we study a multichannel healthcare delivery system with contagion-aware patients. To capture contagion-awareness we formulate a multinomial logit choice model where patients choose between telemedicine and in-person appointments. The main novelty in our model is that the in-person channel has a contagion disutility driven by patients’ fear of contracting the disease in the healthcare center. The contagion disutility is increasing in the number of in-person appointments, which makes the patient choice endogenous. Under this choice model, we formulate an optimization model that allocates capacity and determines pricing in the two channels. We show that capacity allocation and pricing decisions that incorporate patients’ contagion disutility can mitigate revenue losses experienced by healthcare providers during epidemics. If the burden of contracting the disease on the provider/social planner is sufficiently large, high contagion awareness of the patients can increase revenue/welfare. This indicates the importance of modulating patients’ contagion awareness levels and motivates the second part of the study where informational interventions to encourage telemedicine channel choice during respiratory viral epidemics (or seasonal flu) are explored via behavioral laboratory experiments. Our results provide preliminary evidence that nudges about the infection risk elimination or convenience of online consultations are effective. The use of informational interventions in channel choice is promising, as nudge messages are cost-effective and easy to implement. (Joint work  with Elif Karul and Erhun Özkan, Koç University)

Bio: Zeynep Akşin is a Professor of Operations Management at Koç University. She is currently visiting London Business School’s Management Science and Operations Department. She received her PhD in Operations Management from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in 1996. Her research interests are in service operations management. She has studied the design and management of service systems, exploring the impact of behavioral factors and making use of mathematical models, empirical analyses or behavioral experiments.