The Process Implications of using Telemedicine for Chronically Ill Patients: Analyzing Key Consequences for Patients and Medical Specialists

Medical specialists treating chronic conditions typically face a very heterogeneous set of patients. Such heterogeneity arises because of difference in patients’ medical conditions as well as the travel burden each of them faces when trying to reach the clinic. In this paper, we investigate the impact of travel burden on the strategic behavior of medical specialists in terms of their operating decisions. In addressing this problem, we expand current results in queuing theory related to the service speed-quality trade-off for both revenue-maximizing and welfare-maximizing servers in the context of customers with a general and heterogeneous utility function. We find that as the relative travel burden increases for the patients, it also has a negative effect on the productivity of the specialist and his expected income. Comparing the optimal service characteristics of revenue-maximizing and welfare-maximizing specialists we see that the former will overall serve a smaller patient population, will have shorter waiting times, and will operate at a lower utilization. We also analyze the impact of the newly introduced telemedicine technology on patient utility and the specialists’ operating decisions. We prove that with the introduction of telemedicine the revenuemaximizing service rate moves closer to the socially optimal one. While the enhanced access to specialist care increases the overall social welfare, we explain why some patients, unexpectedly, will be even worse-off with the introduction of this technology. Our analytical results lead to some important policy implications for facilitating the further deployment of telemedicine in the care of chronically ill patients.