Recently, Professor Yan Zhijun's team from the School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, has made important research progress in the field of online medical services. The research results“Effects of Online Offline Service Integration on e-Healthcare Providers: A Quasi-Natural Experiment”was published as the LeadArticle in Production and Operations Management Issue 8,2021, a top international journal of management science. The study is the first to explore the impact of online and offline healthcare service integration. We validated the heterogenous role of online and offline integration on different types of physicians.The research work was done in collaboration between Professor Yan Zhijun's team and Professor NiHuang at the University of Houston, USA.

Hospital shortage of medical resources, doctor workload overload and increased queuing time for patients are becoming increasingly prominent. The management of China's medical system is facing new challenges, and the online medical platform has become one of the important ways to deal with this challenge.In order to optimize the patient service experience and improve the work efficiency of doctors, the online medical platform began to integrate its online consultation and offline medical treatment services. Through the integration, doctors can conduct more convenient online consultation, arrange offline medical treatment, and synchronize the patient-related medical records.In order to clarify the interaction mechanism between the channel integration and the doctor consultation volume and the social reputation, and then to effectively provide decision-making suggestions and management support to solve the medical problems and relieve the medical pressure, professor Yan Zhijun and his team took 8 months to collect more than 30,000 doctors' panel data and carried out the relevant empirical research.