When Waiting to See a Doctor is Less Irritating: Understanding Patient Preferences and Choice Behavior in Appointment Scheduling

This paper examines patient preferences and choice behavior in scheduling medical appointments. By conducting discrete choice experiments on two distinct populations, we identify heterogeneous patient preferences in several " operational " attributes (e.g., delay to care, flexibility in time and doctor choice) and individual-difference factors that can explain such heterogeneity. Our study in particular characterizes how patients' perceived utility changes as delay to care increases. For short-term waiting (in-clinic waiting), we find that longer wait is increasingly aversive, suggesting that a convex waiting cost function is reasonable in this setting. For long-term delays (time to appointment), however, we discover an interesting gender effect. While males' waiting cost seems convex, females become less sensitive to further delays in receiving care after waiting reaches a certain level. In addition to providing important evidences on consumer strategic behavior in the healthcare market, our study offers rich managerial insights to improve care delivery via operational strategies.