Unlocking the Power of Joining a Virtual Team: Heterogeneous Impacts of Team Signaling in Telehealth.

The recent proliferation of Telehealth platforms has engendered immense business potential in improving patients' welfare with accessible medical resources and facilitates doctors to expand services to geo-distant locations. In particular, the development of information technology empowers the formation of virtual teams in which doctors can integrate medical resources and specialty knowledge across institutions and departments to provide more comprehensive medical services. This study aims to empirically examine the business value of joining a virtual team on individual doctor's patient demands. Drawing upon signaling theory, we develop a set of hypotheses to provide a theoretical explanation by which virtual team information could affect different types of doctors (e.g., job titles, tenure, popularity, and region) and what types of virtual team (e.g., specialty vs institution based) benefit individual doctors most. We leverage a quasi-natural experiment setting, in which an interface revamp on a leading Telehealth platform in China results in the disclosing information of the team members' identity. Applying Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SynthDID), Generalized Synthetic Control (GSC), and Double Machine Learning (DML) to strengthen the causal identification, we document several novel findings. First, our results suggest that doctors could receive 27.0% more consultations by joining the virtual team. Second, we find that the impact of joining virtual teams is more significant for disadvantaged doctors. Third, our findings suggest that doctors can derive greater benefits from joining virtual teams with homogeneous institutions and heterogeneous specialties. Taken together, this paper provides pivotal insights for all stakeholders in Telehealth to understand the value of virtual teams and improve overall social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]