Superior medical resources or geographic proximity? The joint effects of regional medical resource disparity, geographic distance, and cultural differences on online medical consultation

Online medical consultation platforms enable patients to seek health advice from physicians across geographic regions. In this study, we analyze patterns of online consultation between patients and physicians. We examine the joint effects of regional medical resource disparity, geographic distance, and cultural differences between patients and physicians on patients' decisions about which physicians they consult online. Using a unique dataset of city-to-city tuples based on 813,684 online consultation records and combining it with region-level data from multiple external sources, we find that while regional medical resource disparity drives patients from medically disadvantaged regions to seek online consultations with physicians from medically advantaged regions, geographic distance and cultural differences tend to constrain these consultations. We also find that cultural differences can amplify the impact of regional medical resource disparity, whereas geographic distance may lessen this effect. Further, we discover that the constraining effect of geographic distance is partly due to the online-to-offline nature of online medical consultations. Moreover, additional analyses suggest that physicians' online reputation and information about physicians' participation on the platform can help alleviate the negative effects of geographic distance and cultural differences. These findings hold significant implications for the allocation of medical resources and the formulation of healthcare policies.