Category: Front page

Informal payment for medical services is a common phenomenon in China. Patients make informal payments, in cash or in kind, to physicians in addition to official charges billed for medical services. This paper assesses the associations between patients’ perceptions of the physician as an agent for the patient’s interests (physician agency problem) and informal payment behavior. Using data of 24,000 and 6700 rural households respectively from the Health Development of…

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In this article, we describe China’s Internet health market and illustrate how technology platforms are revolutionizing health care delivery. We utilize two unique data sources: data from the Internet portals of major four Internet health platforms (extracted using Web-scraping tools), together with billing data from one of the four platforms. While China’s Internet health market encompasses a variety of different health care services and products, we focus our discussion on…

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Telemedicine and telehealth hold promise for reducing access barriers, improving quality and containing medical costs. As Internet companies enter the healthcare market, a rising number of online healthcare platforms have emerged worldwide. In some countries like China, public hospital doctors are providing direct-to-consumer telemedicine services on these commercial platforms as independent providers. Such online service provision creates a new form of dual practice, which we refer to as ‘online dual…

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Telemedicine and telehealth hold promise for reducing access barriers caused by travel distance. However, little is known about how the Internet affects patients’ online provider choices and thus the spatial distribution of healthcare utilization. This study investigates the effect of distance on flows of online medical consultations using a unique dataset from one of the leading third-party online healthcare platforms in China: Haodf.com. We show that the geographic distance between…

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This study assessed the management practices of county-level hospitals in Guizhou in southwest China during 2015 using the Development World Management Survey (D-WMS) instrument to interview 273 managers in 139 hospitals and score the hospitals’ management practices. On a scale of 1 (‘worst practice’) to 5 (‘best practice’), the mean (SD) hospital D-WMS scores were 2.57 (0.46) overall; 2.71 (0.48), 2.64 (0.58), 2.40 (0.64), and 2.56 (0.40) for operation, monitoring,…

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How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help address the growing demands for care facing many aging societies–such as China–is both a challenge and an opportunity for innovation. In research supported by the Jiangsu Industrial Technology Institute in China, the authors propose a social technology approach that promotes use of technologies to assist individuals, families, and communities to cope more effectively with the disabilities of older adults who can…

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