Multichannel Healthcare Operations: The Impact of Video Visits on the Usage of In-Person Care

Healthcare organizations have been adopting video visits as an alternative care channel that offers greater convenience and holds promise for improving patients’ access to care. Despite the growing use, the impact of a new digital channel on care demand within existing physical channels has not been investigated in detail, especially in the primary care context of a traditional healthcare organization. We study a large healthcare system that made video visits available to a subset of its patients for primary care needs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a difference-in-differences approach and visit data spanning more than 1.2 million patient–period observations, we find that, when video visits are available, patients make 21% more in-person primary care provider visits and 30% more emergency department visits. When considering only patient-initiated visits, we find that patients initiate more care overall, whereas their in-person care initiations do not change, suggesting that patients initiate care through video visits for needs that may have otherwise gone unattended. Furthermore, we find that the increase in care initiations arises primarily from patients who have poorer access to in-person care. Lastly, compared with in-person visits, we find that video visits are more likely to result in an immediate subsequent in-person visit for acute conditions, particularly those with low virtualizability, but not for chronic conditions regardless of virtualizability. Our findings have important capacity and revenue implications for healthcare organizations considering video visits as an additional channel of care delivery.

This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management.

Funding: This work was supported by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management.

Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06271.