Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Online medical consultation: Waiting for the doctor’s response

I am a proud son of a nurse. In other words, I grew up in and around healthcare facilities. As a child, when I was not well and could not make it to school, I ended up spending time hanging out at the polyclinic my mum was working in, until she closed and we returned home.

I am talking of 1980s Ghana, so when I think of healthcare, I still think old-school. This is probably why this whole telemedicine thing feels kind of strange to me. I just cannot come to terms with people sending messages to their doctors through online medical platforms and receiving responses via those same means.

The experience of those who have tried online consultation, if I am to believe them, has been described as something between hope and helplessness. I am told that the typical experience is that of the patient typing out his or her symptoms carefully, reviewing the message twice, and pressing “send”. Then the person waits. An hour passes.

Then two. By the time a response finally appears on the one’s screen, the one would have already consulted two different websites, convinced himself or herself of three possible diagnoses, and worked his or her anxiety up to a pitch that no amount of medical reassurance is going to fully undo. The reply, when it comes, though, is normally thorough and genuinely helpful. But something would already be lost in the waiting.

Most of us would look at the preceding narrative and arrive at a very straightforward conclusion: the doctors should respond faster. Speed, in the world of customer service, has become almost synonymous with quality. We live in an era of instant messaging, same-day delivery, and real-time everything. The idea that a faster response is always a better response feels less like an opinion and more like a law of nature. In the context of healthcare—where the stakes are even higher and the anxiety more acute—the case for speed seems even more airtight.

Right? Well, not entirely.

A compelling new study published in the February 2026 edition of the Journal of Business Research is asking us to think much more carefully about the relationship between response time and patient satisfaction in online medical consultation platforms. The title of the study was “The Shorter the Response Time, The Higher the Customer Satisfaction? An Empirical Study of Online Medical Consultation Services.”

Its findings, drawn from a large transaction-level dataset from one of China’s leading online medical consultation services, are as nuanced as they are counterintuitive. The short version is this: when it comes to how quickly a doctor responds online, both too slow and too fast can be a problem. The relationship between response time and satisfaction, it turns out, is not a straight line. It is a curve.

The researchers ground their work in signalling theory—the idea that in situations where one party has more information than the other, certain behaviours send signals that the less-informed party uses to make judgements. In the context of online medical consultations, the patient typically cannot assess the quality of a physician the way they might in an in-person setting. There is no waiting room to observe, no physical bearing to read, no certificates on the wall to inspect. All the patient has, in many cases, is the digital trace of the interaction itself—including how quickly the doctor responds.

And here is where it gets genuinely interesting. A doctor’s response time sends two signals simultaneously, and they pull in opposite directions. On one hand, a faster response signals availability, attentiveness, and a genuine willingness to help—qualities any patient would value.

On the other hand, a response that comes almost instantaneously can, in a medical context, trigger a very different kind of signal: has this doctor actually read my message carefully? Has he considered my symptoms properly? Or did he simply fire off a reply before fully engaging with what I wrote? In medicine, more than perhaps any other service context, the patient needs to feel heard and carefully considered—not just quickly processed.

The study’s findings confirm this tension precisely. The researchers found inverted U-shaped relationships between response times—both before the consultation begins and during the consultation itself—and two key dimensions of patient satisfaction: attitude satisfaction, which relates to how patients feel about the physician’s manner and approach, and efficacy satisfaction, which relates to how useful patients found the consultation in actually addressing their health concerns.

What the inverted U-shape tells us is that satisfaction rises as response time decreases from very slow to moderate—but then begins to fall again as response time decreases further towards the near-instantaneous. There is, in other words, a sweet spot. A response time that is neither too sluggish nor too hasty.

As a matter of fact, this finding challenges some of the most deeply held assumptions in service management. The relentless drive towards faster and faster response times, which has shaped the design of customer service operations across virtually every industry, rests on the premise that speed and satisfaction move together in the same direction. The faster you serve, the better the experience. This study suggests that in contexts where thoughtfulness and thoroughness are central to the value being delivered—and healthcare is surely the most obvious such context—that premise needs revisiting.

The research goes further still. It examines how certain characteristics of the patient and the physician either strengthen or weaken this curved relationship. Two factors on the patient side were found to sharpen the effect: a patient’s regional affiliation and their familiarity with the physician.

A patient who shares a regional background with their doctor, or who has consulted that same doctor before, has a heightened sensitivity to response time signals. For these patients, the curve is steeper—the penalties for both extremes of response time are more severe. This makes intuitive sense. A returning patient has built certain expectations based on prior experience. A patient from the same region may carry a cultural closeness that makes impersonal speed feel even more jarring.

On the physician side, the study found that professional status has the opposite effect—it flattens the curve. Patients who are consulting a doctor of recognised seniority and professional standing are more forgiving of response time variations in both directions.

If a highly respected physician takes a while to respond, the patient is more willing to attribute the delay to a busy schedule rather than neglect. And if the same physician responds with impressive speed, the patient is less likely to suspect shallow attention, trusting instead that the doctor’s expertise allows them to assess and respond efficiently. Reputation, it seems, is a buffer. It softens the signals that response time sends.

I have realised that the implications of the findings of this particular study are much broader than online medical consultations. It speaks to the question of what signals we send through our service behaviours, often without being fully aware of it.

Every customer-facing professional sends signals through the way they respond—not just through what they say, but through how long they take to say it, how much care appears to have gone into their words, and what kind of attention the customer feels they have received. Speed is one signal among many, and like all signals, its meaning depends heavily on context.

One can only imagine the number of online service platforms—in healthcare and beyond—that have been optimised purely for response speed, with no thought given to how that speed is being interpreted by the person on the receiving end. A platform designed to push physicians towards the fastest possible reply times may, in practice, be quietly eroding the very satisfaction it is trying to build. The metric looks good on the dashboard. The patient experience, however, tells a more complicated story.

For the growing ecosystem of online medical consultation platforms, the practical implications of this research deserve serious attention. Platform designers and service managers need to move beyond the simple logic of faster equals better and begin thinking about optimal response windows—time ranges that communicate both availability and diligence.

They need to consider the patient segment they are serving: a first-time patient and a returning patient are not interpreting the same response time in the same way. And they need to be deliberate about how physician credentials are surfaced to patients, given that professional status demonstrably changes the way patients read the signals that response time sends.

There is a reason the best physicians have always been known not just for what they know, but for how they listen. In the digital age, listening is no longer only about eye contact and the unhurried nod. It is also about the considered pause before the reply—the moment that tells a patient, wordlessly, that their concern has been taken seriously.

In medicine as in life, the right response is rarely the fastest one. It is the one that arrives at exactly the right time.

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