Effects of online-offline channel integration on e-healthcare providers: Evidence from a natural experiment

In order to satisfy more patients with various demands, online healthcare community started to integrate the online and offline channels, where patients can consult healthcare providers online, be diagnosed in the hospital or service provider's office, communicate with the provider face to face, and, finally, make online inquiries about follow-up and recovery anytime and anywhere. In this study, we seek to quantify the effects of channel integration on service providers in the online health communities, noting that it is not altogether clear how the online-offline channel integration will affect e-healthcare providers' performance, including their demand of each channel and social reputation. And we further explore the moderating roles of provider-specific characteristics. We study the questions in the context of an online healthcare community website which has implemented the online-offline channel integration in China, collecting an eight-month panel data set. Leveraging a difference-in-differences analysis with various matching techniques, our results reveal several interesting findings: 1) the online-offline integration leads to increases in online demand for e-healthcare providers yet decreases in the offline demand for providers; 2) the online-offline integration improves the professional reputation of participating e-healthcare providers; 3) there are multiple providers' characteristics that moderate the main effects, such as providers' profession titles, location, and medical specialization. This work helps answer research questions concerning the online-offline channel integration as an antecedent to healthcare provider performance measures and various provider-level heterogeneities, which offers valuable design implications for online health communities.