Editorial: Delivering effective healthcare at lower cost: Introduction to the special issue

摘要

The healthcare industry represents a substantial portion of worldwide economic and social activities and initiatives and employs many people around the globe. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that its member countries spend over 8% of gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare. The United States spends almost 18% of GDP and is projected to move closer to 20% in the near future (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that there are over 59 million workers in the healthcare arena, while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that the United States alone has over 18 million (Centers for Disease Control, 2018; World Health Organization, 2019). Research about health-related problems by operations-management (OM) scholars is increasing: The Journal of Operations Management (JOOM) has published 22 papers on this topic (not including these in this special issue) since 2015. One reason research by OM scholars about healthcare processes has rapidly increased is the open access to rich data sets that enable investigations on core operational issues. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have collected and made available volumes of data (e.g., Ding, 2013; Dobrzykowski, McFadden, & Vonderembse, 2016; Senot, Chandrasekaran, & Ward, 2016), enabling OM researchers to partner with medical professionals to examine pressing, real world, operational issues in healthcare. The editorial team, led by Lawrence Fredendall and Jeff Smith and assisted by Healthcare department co-editors Anand Nair and Anita Tucker, considered papers about any aspect of healthcare delivery and using any methodology as long as the paper maintained JOOM's empirical focus. In all, we received 73 submissions to the special issue. Each was evaluated by teams of knowledgeable individuals.1 At the end of this process, 11 papers were accepted for the SI. The 11 SI papers are outlined in detail in Tables 1 and 2. The papers are presented in two broad groups—operational and strategic—based on their level of investigation. These 11 articles use a wide range of operational and outcome data to address multiple aspects of the healthcare environment. Two papers (Catena, Dopson, & Holweg, 2020; Lee, Venkataraman, Heim, Roth, & Chilingerian, 2020) examine how operational policies set by a national health system affect the delivery of healthcare. Two papers (Ding, Peng, Heim, & Jordan, 2020 and Mishra, Salzarulo, & Modi, 2020) examine how strategic approaches taken by hospitals, possibly in response to national health-system policies, affect the delivery of healthcare in those hospitals. Two papers describe hospital-emergency-department operations (Berry Jaeker & Tucker, 2020; Davis, Zobel, Khansa, & Glick, 2020). Two papers (Dreyfus, Nair, & Rosales, 2020; Mukherjee & Sinha, 2020) examine perioperative services. Two papers examine operations at the level of the entire hospital (Johnson, Burgess, & Sethi, 2020; Tucker, Zheng, Gardner, & Bohn, 2020). In addition, two papers (Mukherjee & Sinha, 2020; Stevens & van Schaik, 2020) use the lens of new-technology implementation to examine how technology affects care delivery. Tables 1 and 2 also reveal the variety of methods employed. Seven papers analyze secondary data, two use observational studies, one is an ethnographic study, one a case study, one collects and analyzes survey data, and one applies a design-science methodology. Six papers examine traditional OM topics related to healthcare at the operational level. Three papers examine aspects of process design, two examine the operation of the system, and one examines how learning occurs, while implementing a new technology. In the first paper, “The value of process friction: The role of justification in reducing medical costs,” Berry Jaeker and Tucker (2020) explore the impact of including an arguably non-value-added “justification” step (i.e.,