A Blessing or a Curse? Teletriage Service in Healthcare

Teletriage is a telehealth service that uses telecommunication technologies to remotely assess patients’ conditions and determine their needs for medical treatment. This paper examines how teletriage affects patients’ decisions to seek treatment and when healthcare providers (e.g., medical businesses, hospitals, or clinics) should launch teletriage services. Our findings reveal that teletriage can encourage more mild patients to seek treatment, discouraging more severe patients. This occurs when teletriage lacks sufficient precision and patients’ hassle cost of seeking treatment falls outside a moderate range. Specifically, when hassle costs are low, patients are generally inclined to seek treatment, but teletriage can misclassify severe patients, leading them to avoid necessary care. Conversely, when hassle costs are high, patients tend to stay home, yet teletriage can misidentify mild patients, prompting them to seek unnecessary treatment. As a result, even if teletriage is costless, healthcare providers may abandon this service even though teletriage always increases patient surplus by improving their assessment of their medical needs. Interestingly, patients can be better off seeking treatment from providers who charge higher prices as these providers are more likely to adopt teletriage services. These results caution healthcare policymakers that teletriage can exacerbate healthcare inefficiency instead of alleviating it. Nevertheless, to improve patient surplus, the government should sometimes subsidize providers to offer teletriage or allow providers to charge a higher treatment fee. This paper was accepted by Dmitri Kuksov, marketing. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71821001, 72325005] and the Blanche “Peg” Philpott Professorship. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03292 .