Offline to online: The impacts of offline visit experience on online behaviors and service in an Internet hospital

Only the online-to-offline process has been explored, the literature is largely silent on the offline-to-online process, which restricts the online service quality and the development of Internet hospitals. We approach this issue by investigating the impact of patients’ offline visit experience on their online engagement, and then how patients’ online engagement affects the quality and efficiency of physicians’ online services. Using archival data with 69,078 online consultation records from a large tertiary hospital and its Internet hospital in China, we developed several regression models to analyze the impact of offline visit experience on patients’ online information provision and the effect of online information provision on service quality and efficiency. We identified that offline visit experience has heterogeneous effects on patients’ online information provision, and patients’ online information provision positively influences physicians’ online service quality, while negatively influencing online service efficiency. Moreover, online information provision mediates the relationship between offline visit experience and online service quality. This study contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms by which the offline visit experience influences online service quality in the online-offline channel integration context.