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. We conduct four discrete choice experiments on two distinct populations and identify several “operational” attributes (e.g., delay to care and choice of doctor) that affect patient choice. We observe an interesting gender effect with respect to how patients trade off speed (delay to care) and quality (doctor of choice), and demonstrate that risk attitudes mediate the impact of gender on the perception of speed and quality. Specifically, females (versus males) are more averse to not seeing their own doctor, and, when delay to care is relatively long, females perceive greater utility loss than males. As many operational strategies in outpatient care aim to improve the patient experience by making trade-offs between speed and quality, we make suggestions for when managers should intervene to improve their practice and how such interventions might look based on the patient mix and current delay level. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2704 . This paper was accepted by Gad Allon, operations management.