Abstract
Healthcare authorities are encouraging managers in hospitals to acquire clinical experience and knowledge in order to better carry out and coordinate healthcare service delivery. The main objective of this paper is to analyse how the clinical experience of hospital managers is related to public health institutions’ performance. It is proposed that the effect of the clinical experience on operative and financial organizational performance is indirect through the mediating variables of perceived utility of management information and horizontal management control system. This paper analyses how these variables impact hospital performance through the data from a survey sent to 364 hospital managers in Brazil. The results show that managers’ clinical experience is related to higher perceived utility of historical, financial, short-term, and internal information, but not with horizontal control adoption in hospitals. Furthermore, our results show that, in hospitals, perceived utility of forecasted, non-financial, long-term, and external managerial information positively affects hospitals’ financial performance, while adoption of horizontal control management positively affects operational performance. Through showing evidence that clinical background could explain the differences not only in hospital service management but also in information capabilities and management control processes, this study offer meaningful implications for healthcare authorities and hospital managers involved in the development and implementation of strategies in the health sector.
Highlights
Under the new public management paradigm, hospital managers are required to deliver greater efficiency and more flexible public services
These findings show that the perception of the usefulness of information acts as an intervening variable in the relationship between clinical experience and financial performance, explaining approximately 17.5% of the variance in financial performance
As public hospitals are organizations that spend more than 10% of their budget on processing and using managerial information, understanding how managers use management control seems important, especially when management control is key to managing hospital services and implementing healthcare policies and strategies
Summary
Under the new public management paradigm, hospital managers are required to deliver greater efficiency and more flexible public services. For example, Brazil, formal legislation requires healthcare authorities to encourage hospitals to become more efficient organizations that respond to citizens’ demands with higher quality services at lower costs [1,2]. Hospitals are characterized as organizations with interdependent and complex activities, a lot of teamwork, and interconnectedness between health services. Managers should implement managerial strategies that enhance control over clinical complexity by better allocating healthcare resources and coordination of services [3,4]. Several authors argue that the efficient allocation of resources requires a remarkable understanding of the capacities and resources of the organization, and such an understanding can only be developed over time through experience with human resources, Int. J. Public Health 2018, 15, 776; doi:10.3390/ijerph15040776 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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