( Under Review )
Using a unique set of hospital claims data, we study the effect of telehealth expansion on the disparities between care access in rural and urban areas during COVID-19. We use urban areas as the control group and compare the number of in-person visits between rural and urban areas before and after the expansion. We find that the telehealth policy expansion indeed reduces urban patients’ in-person visits, yet rural patients’ in-person visits are not much affected. As a result, the disparity between rural-urban in-person visits increases by 12.5% following the expansion. To understand the underlying mechanisms, we compare rural and urban patients’ telehealth visits and the total visits (i.e., the sum of in-person and telehealth visits) before and after the expansion. We find that urban patients substitute in-person visits with telehealth visits. However, rural patients have much lower adoption rates of telehealth services and continued with in-person visits. Finally, we perform visit-level analyses and identify patients’ social determinants and physicians’ characteristics that might have affected telehealth adoptions. Our findings are important to researchers and providers in understanding the implications of telehealth expansion on rural-urban disparities and the existing barriers when expanding telehealth in rural areas.

( Major Revision at MIS Quarterly )
Recent advances in information technologies have put customer service, especially text-based ones, at the forefront of a new wave of service automation. As algorithms become increasingly capable of handling customer service queries, customers are often uncertain whether they are served by humans, and managers are left to question the value of keeping human agents once the technology matures. The current paper studies this important and timely question by quantifying how a simple policy change that enhances customers’ perception of them being served by human agents affects customer service interactions. Our identification strategy hinges on the abrupt implementation by Southwest Airlines of a signature policy, which requires the inclusion of an agent’s first name in responses to customer queries on Twitter, thereby making the agent more humanized in the minds of customers. Various empirical analyses consistently show that customers are more willing to engage, and upon engagement, more likely to reach a resolution, when agents are perceived as more humanized. Furthermore, we find no evidence of elevated verbal aggression from customers to more humanized agents, hence humanization seems to incur no additional cost to agents. Our findings suggest a readily available and almost costless strategy for customer service provision on social media: signal humanization through a signature of each agent. Despite the increasing trend of automating customer service, our study reveals the importance of humanization, which can at least be partly interpreted by customers’ bias in favor of humans when it comes to customer service.

( Accepted at Journal of Management Information Systems )
Despite many advantages of social media as a customer service channel, there is a concern that active service intervention encourages excessive service complaints. Our paper casts doubt on this misconception by examining the dynamics between social media customer complaints and brand service interventions. We find service interventions indeed cause more complaints, yet this increase is driven by service awareness rather than chronic complaining. Due to the publicity and connectivity of social media, customers learn about the new service channel by observing customer service delivery to others – a mechanism that is unique to social media customer service and does not exist for traditional call centers. Importantly, high-quality service reduces future complaints, thereby proactive customer service is a sound strategy on social media, as long as firms dedicate to service quality. Hence, firms should be less concerned about whether to respond and more focused on how to respond to customer complaints.

( Information Systems Research (2020) )
Overcrowding in emergency rooms (ERs) is a common yet nagging problem. It not only is costly for hospitals but also compromises care quality and patient experience. Hence, finding effective ways to improve ER care delivery is of great importance. Using a large dataset covering all emergency visits of New York State from 2010 to 2014, we investigate whether telemedicine enhances ER care delivery. We show that, on average, telemedicine availability in the ER significantly reduces average patients’ length of stay (LOS), which is partially driven by the flexible resource allocation. Specifically, the adoption of telemedicine leads to a larger reduction in ER LOS when there is a demand surge or supply shortage. Furthermore, such improvement is not a byproduct of other widely adopted health IT applications and does not come at the expense of care quality or patient cost. We also replicate the analysis using annual U.S. hospital data and find that ER telemedicine adoption significantly reduces average patients’ waiting time, which suggests that the LOS reduction partially comes from the reduction of waiting time.