ObjectiveTaking neurology as an example, to analyze the impact of the development of online outpatient services of a hospital on the volume of offline outpatient business and the composition of patients, and to provide a reference for the coordinated management of online and offline services. MethodsDescriptive statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA), rank sum test, correlation statistics, lexical processing and word frequency statistics were used to analyze the online and offline outpatient visits, outpatient diagnoses and other related information of the Department of Neurology of a certain hospital from 2020 to 2023. And to compare the differences in the business volume, the percentage of patients with initial diagnosis, the outpatient inpatient conversion rate, and the composition of outpatient diseases in the observation period. ResultsBetween 2020 and 2023, online outpatient visits increased by 350%, while offline visits decreased by 8%, leading to an overall increase of 11% in total outpatient visits. The proportion of online and offline first visits increased by 8% and 11%, respectively, and the online and offline outpatient-hospitalization conversion rates increased by 22% and 46%, respectively. In addition, online and offline outpatient visits showed a significant negative correlation, with a correlation coefficient of −0.29. Online outpatient visits showed a significant positive correlation with offline outpatient-hospitalization conversion rates, with a correlation coefficient of 0.69. There was a significant positive association between the percentage of online first visits and the online and offline inpatient admission rates following outpatient visits, with Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.63 and 0.45, respectively. The top five disease categories online were psychiatric disorders of neurological origins, epilepsy, movement disorders, cerebrovascular disease and dizziness and headache; the top five offline categories were psychiatric disorders of neurological origins, cerebrovascular disease, dizziness and headache, neurological complications of medical diseases and movement disorders. ConclusionThe hospital’s online business volume increased significantly, with a certain impact on offline volume, but no significant effect on the main outpatient diagnoses. In the future, online outpatient services can be optimized in terms of the service process and content for first-time patients, patients with co-morbidities or undifferentiated diseases, and elderly patients, to build a continuity management system for the whole process of outpatient care.