Journal ArticleDOI
Past the Point of Speeding Up: The Negative Effects of Workload Saturation on Efficiency and Patient Severity
TLDR
Using two years of inpatient data from 203 California hospitals, evidence is found that patient length of stay (LOS) increases as occupancy increases, until a tipping point, after which patients are discharged early to alleviate congestion.Abstract:
Service organizations face a trade-off between high utilization and responsiveness. High utilization can improve financial performance, but causes congestion, which increases throughput time. Employees may manage this trade-off by reducing processing times during periods of high workload, resulting in an inverted U-shaped relationship between utilization and throughput time. Using two years of inpatient data from 203 California hospitals, we find evidence that patient length of stay (LOS) increases as occupancy increases, until a tipping point, after which patients are discharged early to alleviate congestion. More interestingly, we find a second tipping point—at 93% occupancy—beyond which additional occupancy leads to a longer LOS. These results are indicative of a workload-related “saturation effect” where employees can no longer overcome high workload by speeding up. Our data suggest that the saturation effect is due to an increase in the workload requirements of the remaining patients. Collectively, w...read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Early Task Initiation and Other Load-Adaptive Mechanisms in the Emergency Department
TL;DR: It is shown that having some diagnostic tests ordered during the triage process reduces treatment time by 20 minutes, on average, however, ordering too many tests at triage can lead to an increase in the total number of tests performed on the patient.
Journal ArticleDOI
Gatekeepers at Work: An Empirical Analysis of a Maternity Unit
TL;DR: This work uses a detailed operational and clinical data set from a maternity hospital to investigate how workload affects decisions in gatekeeper-provider systems, where the servers act as gatekeepers to specialists but may also attempt to serve customers themselves, albeit with a probability of success decreasing in the complexity of the customers’ needs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Patient Portals in Primary Care: Impacts on Patient Health and Physician Productivity*
TL;DR: Using a panel data set from a large healthcare system in the United States, it is found that e-visits trigger about 6% more office visits, with mixed results on phone visits and patient health.
Journal ArticleDOI
Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Ruomeng Cui,Hao Ding,Feng Zhu +2 more
TL;DR: In this article, the disproportionate impact of lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academic research productivity in social science was studied. But the authors focused on the lockdown effect on women.
Journal ArticleDOI
OM Forum—Healthcare Operations Management: A Snapshot of Emerging Research
Tinglong Dai,Sridhar Tayur +1 more
TL;DR: A new generation of healthcare operations management (HOM) scholars is studying timely healthcare topics (e.g., organization design, design of delivery, and organ transplantation) using contemporar...
References
More filters
Book
Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data
TL;DR: This is the essential companion to Jeffrey Wooldridge's widely-used graduate text Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data (MIT Press, 2001).
Book
Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis
Judith D. Singer,John B. Willett +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a framework for investigating change over time is presented, where the multilevel model for change is introduced and a framework is presented for investigating event occurrence over time.
Journal ArticleDOI
Comorbidity measures for use with administrative data.
TL;DR: The present method addresses some of the limitations of previous measures and produces an expanded set of comorbidities that easily is applied without further refinement to administrative data for a wide range of diseases.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hospital Nurse Staffing and Patient Mortality, Nurse Burnout, and Job Dissatisfaction
TL;DR: In hospitals with high patient- to-nurse ratios, surgical patients experience higher risk-adjusted 30-day mortality and failure-to-rescue rates, and nurses are more likely to experience burnout and job dissatisfaction.