2447. Behavioral Interventions Encouraging Telemedicine Adoption in Epidemic Contexts
Invited abstract in session MD-13: Pandemics and epidemics, stream OR in Healthcare (ORAHS).
Monday, 14:30-16:00Room: Clarendon SR 1.01
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Zeynep Aksin
|
| Koc University | |
| 2. | Elif Karul
|
| Operations Management & Information Systems, Koç University | |
| 3. | Erhun Ozkan
|
| Koc University |
Abstract
Telemedicine is an alternative healthcare delivery channel, that offers opportunities to increase access to care by eliminating transportation barriers, enabling earlier appointment times, and mitigating the spread of infection due to respiratory virus epidemics. The infection risk avoidance opportunity provided by telemedicine can be beneficial for healthcare providers in terms of limiting revenue losses and protecting healthcare workers and patients from contracting the virus. We study the possibility of using informational interventions to encourage telemedicine channel choice during respiratory viral epidemics via behavioral laboratory experiments. We explore multiple informational interventions in a series of studies: infection risk elimination, appointment wait time difference, and convenience messages, all under scenarios that provide an epidemic context. We show that an infection risk elimination message can significantly improve telemedicine channel choice compared to a control with no reminder. A reminder focusing on the convenience aspect of a telemedicine appointment is shown to increase telemedicine choice relative to a control group that receives no reminder. The effectiveness of informational interventions in channel choice is promising, as nudge messages are cost-effective and easy to implement. Our results provide preliminary evidence that nudges can be used to manage patient demand between channels during respiratory virus epidemics or seasonal flu periods.
Keywords
- Health Care
- Behavioural OR
- Service Operations
Status: accepted
Back to the list of papers