Mobilizing healthcare across geography through telemedicine consultations

Many countries report that medical professionals such as physicians are highly concentrated in urban cities, while too few are available in rural cities. Telemedicine consultations allow patients to virtually search, receive, and pay for a physician-to-patient medical consultation. With its capability of remote diagnosis and treatment, telemedicine consultation offers great opportunities to mobilize healthcare to rural cities without relocating medical professionals. This study aims to investigate whether such mobilization actually occurs. By analyzing ten years of telemedicine consultation and offline physician data, we find that telemedicine consultations indeed mobilize healthcare from urban to rural cities by facilitating consultations between urban physicians and rural patients. Yet, our analysis reveals that the number of telemedicine consultations decreases as two cities become farther apart. This finding is driven by the following mechanisms that are supported from our analysis of granular data (including consultation fees, physician ranks, and illness types): (1) consultation fees of urban physicians are too expensive for rural patients, discouraging them to seek telemedicine consultations from urban physicians, and (2) telemedicine consultations need to be supplemented by offline consultations because of low information bandwidth. Lastly, we find that the portion of telemedicine consultations crossing province (state) borders are about 358 times greater than that of offline medical consultations. This discrepancy indicates that telemedicine consultations, although still constrained by distance, redistribute healthcare services from urban to rural cities above and beyond what have done through patients' travel in an offline setting.