Paccar Hall, Room 290
Seminar Speaker: Elina Hwang
Affiliation: University of Washington
Area: Information Systems Name of Presentation: Rebalancing Geographic Health Resource Disparity Through Telemedicine Abstract:
Geographic health resource disparity is a longstanding social problem. This study empirically investigates whether a centralized tele-medical consultation service empowered by an online health community can alleviate the problem. The tele-medical consultation service offers rural patients an easy and inexpensive access to additional health resources by enabling them to virtually search, arrange, and pay for medical consultations with any participating physicians across locations. Utilizing both offline and online health resource flow data, our ERGM network analysis reveals encouraging evidence that the tele-medical consultation service can reduce geographic health resource disparity. That is, it facilitates medical consultations between physicians in health resource-rich cities and patients in health resource-poor cities. Yet, we also found a strong constraining effect of geographic distance on health resource redistribution. Together our results suggest that even though the tele-medical consultation service can mitigate geographic health resource disparity, its effect is localized. |