Health Care Management Review Research Articles

In what ways are HR analytics and artificial intelligence transforming the healthcare sector?

Our Special Issue is focused on the healthcare sector relevant to the Asia Pacific region, including hospitals, aged care facilities, allied health, doctors, nurses, management and administration staff and all services associated with the healthcare industry. There are a range of issues that impact on healthcare including the growing use of health services during the pandemic, emergency situations, complex forms of technology, worker expectations, work intensification, and government reporting requirements. More research needs to be carried out in these issues as well as social policy, the delivery and quality of patient care, gender in the workplace, disability, and management innovation (Cooke and Bartram, 2015; Human Resource Management, 2015, 54, 711). There are high levels of stress due to staff being overworked and experiencing a lack of coping skills (Pariona‐Cabrera et al., 2023; Health Care Management Review, 2023, 48, 42), burnout manifestations through emotional exhaustion (Maslach, 2017; Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 2017, 69, 143) which often result in intention to leave (Holland et al., 2019; Applied Nursing Research, 2019, 49, 70; Pariona‐Cabrera, Cavanagh and Bartram, 2020; Journal of Advanced Nursing, 2020, 76, 1581; Shao et al., 2023; Human Resource Management Journal, 2023, 33,187). In Australia, more than 70% of 366,000 nurses working in aged care facilities have reported at least one experience of workplace violence during the previous 12 months including physical and verbal violence from residents, relatives, and visitors (Schablon et al., 2018; International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2018, 15, 1274). There are too many managers who rely on underdeveloped HR processes and outdated management perceptions to make decisions about the well‐being of healthcare staff. Countries in the Asia‐Pacific region are actively seeking partnership projects and new ways to enhance the performance of healthcare staff and their organisations. We have touched on broad issues here and argue it is possible some of the answers can be found in the use of HR analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

A text mining study of topics and trends in health care management journals: 1998-2018.

Advances in natural language processing and text mining provide a powerful approach to understanding trending themes in the health care management literature. The aim of this study was to introduce machine learning, particularly text mining and natural language processing, as a viable approach to summarizing a subset of health care management research. The secondary aim of the study was to display the major foci of health care management research and to summarize the literature's evolution trends over a 20-year period. Article abstracts (N = 2,813), from six health care management journals published from 1998 through 2018 were evaluated through latent semantic analysis, topic analysis, and multiple correspondence analysis. Using latent semantic analysis and topic analysis on 2,813 abstracts revealed eight distinct topics. Of the eight, three leadership and transformation, workforce well-being, and delivery of care issues were up-trending, whereas organizational performance, patient-centeredness, technology and innovation, and managerial issues and gender concerns exhibited downward trending. Finance exhibited peaks and troughs throughout the study period. Four journals, Frontiers of Health Services Management, Journal of Healthcare Management, Health Care Management Review, and Advances in Health Care Management, exhibited strong associations with finance, organizational performance, technology and innovation, managerial issues and gender concerns, and workforce well-being. The Journal of Health Management and the Journal of Health Organization and Management were more distant from the other journals and topics, except for delivery of care, and leadership and transformation. There was a close association of journals and research topics, and research topics evolved with changes in the health care environment. As scholars develop research agendas, focus should be on topics important to health care management practitioners for better informed decision-making.

Much Activity, Uncertainty Remains.

Bipartisan market stabilization negotiations gave way to a last-gasp attempt at repeal and replace; the ACA emerged intact but buffeted by uncertainty.

Journal Rankings by Health Management Faculty Members: Are There Differences by Rank, Leadership Status, or Area of Expertise?

Health administration (HA) faculty members publish in a variety of journals, including journals focused on management, economics, policy, and information technology. HA faculty members are evaluated on the basis of the quality and quantity of their journal publications. However, it is unclear how perceptions of these journals vary by subdiscipline, department leadership role, or faculty rank. It is also not clear how perceptions of journals may have changed over the past decade since the last evaluation of journal rankings in the field was published. The purpose of the current study is to examine how respondents rank journals in the field of HA, as well as the variation in perception by academic rank, department leadership status, and area of expertise. Data were drawn from a survey of HA faculty members at U.S. universities, which was completed in 2012. Different journal ranking patterns were noted for faculty members of different subdisciplines. The health management-oriented journals (Health Care Management Review and Journal of Healthcare Management) were ranked higher than in previous research, suggesting that journal ranking perceptions may have changed over the intervening decade. Few differences in perceptions were noted by academic rank, but we found that department chairs were more likely than others to select Health Affairs in their top three most prestigious journals (β = 0.768; p < .01). Perceived journal prestige varied between a department chair and untenured faculty in different disciplines, and this perceived difference could have implications for promotion and tenure decisions.

The Bold Realities for Health Care Management Review of Electronic Publish-Ahead-of-Print

The Bold Realities for Health Care Management Review of Electronic Publish-Ahead-of-Print

Specialty Hospital Market Proliferation: Strategic Implications for General Hospitals: Erratum

Health Care Management Review: January 2011 - Volume 36 - Issue 1 - p 17 doi: 10.1097/01.HMR.0000391443.40327.60

Special issue of Health Care Management Review

Special issue of Health Care Management Review

The shocking cost of turnover in health care

Review of turnover costs at a major medical center helps health care managers gain insights about the magnitude and determinants of this managerial challenge and assess the implications for organizational effectiveness. Here, turnover includes hiring, training, and productivity loss costs. Minimum cost of turnover represented a loss of >5 percent of the total annual operating budget. Editor's Note: This article is being reprinted with permission from Health Care Management Review 29(1), 2-7.

No magic targets! Changing clinical practice to become more evidence based

This article focuses on the diffusion and adoption of innovations in clinical practice. The authors are specifically interested in underresearched questions concerning the latter stages of the creation, diffusion, and adoption of new knowledge, namely: What makes this information credible and therefore utilized? Why do actors decide to use new knowledge? And what is the significance of the social context of which actors are a part? This article first appeared in Health Care Management Review, 27(3), 35-47.

Health Care Management Review 35th Anniversary

Health Care Management Review 35th Anniversary

Strategic performance in hospitals

The competitive and dynamic health care sector has spurred hospitals into delivering greater flexibility and quality of services while cutting the hospital cost at the same time. However, hospitals differ in the extent to which they achieve these strategic goals. This article explores the use of a new management tool-the balanced scorecard-which facilitates managers to meet multiple strategic goals. It also analyzes how nurse managers use the balanced scorecard in an interactive or diagnostic way and its subsequent effect on strategic goal achievement (cost reduction and flexibility). It also examines how "balanced" is the balanced scorecard in terms of financial versus nonfinancial measures. Data were collected from a mail survey sent to 218 nurse managers in Spanish public hospitals. A satisfactory response rate was achieved, with 114 (52.29%) useful answered questionnaires. The results show that younger, more tenured, and clinically trained nurse managers would be more likely to use the balanced scorecard in an interactive way. Conversely, older, less tenured, and administratively trained managers would use it diagnostically. The results also indicate that the balanced scorecard facilitates the cost reduction and flexibility in hospitals only when it is used interactively. This article provides evidence that not only the technical design of the balanced scorecard matters, but also an appropriate use of the balanced scorecard is paramount for achievement of multiple strategic goals. An effective use of the balanced scorecard requires managers to actively stimulate dialogue and agreement among hospital's staff about desirable financial and nonfinancial performance measures in alignment with multiple strategic goals.

RNs: The Critical Factor In The U.S. Nursing Workforce

Although this book’s title suggests a comprehensive overview of the U.S. nursing workforce, this book has a more narrow focus on the nation’s supply of and demand for registered nurses (RNs). In part, the decision to eliminate consideration of licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and nurse aides (NAs) is based on the availability of data over a sustained period of time to enable accurate and meaningful interpretation. RNs are viewed by the authors as having “a much larger impact on the productivity of the nursing workforce” than LPNs or NAs; they “earn higher wages, and exert a much greater effect on healthcare spending, quality of care, and patient safety.” Readers of this book will not conclude that there is a national “crisis” in regard to the RN workforce. However, the authors describe in great detail a number of harbingers of considerable concern that if ignored could lead to serious compromises in our ability to provide needed health care services, especially in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. This book is essentially an analysis of basic patterns of “supply” of and “demand” for RNs and the services they provide in the context of the U.S. health care system. The authors offer an analytical approach that is likely to be useful both for classroom applications in health care policy and labor economics and for policymakers and nursing professional advocates. Basically, the authors have updated previous estimates of anticipated shortages of RNs, suggesting that shortages between 2015 and 2020 will be in the range of 285,000 RNs—a figure somewhat lower than initially calculated a few years ago but still nearly three times the size of current shortages. More importantly, they show that the current shortages (measured by the number of vacant RN positions) have persisted since the late 1990s and represent the “longest lasting shortage in over 50 years.” In some respects, at least for RNs in the current labor market, all aspects of this analysis are unlikely to be seen as “bad news.” The authors anticipate that the shortages will result in upward pressure on RNs’ wages, followed by movement toward new educational opportunities for entry into the nursing field and an increase in the popularity of nursing as a career (on the supply side). Such changes will be followed by increased emphasis on alternative types of providers of what have been considered “nursing” tasks by health care organizations (the demand side). Many of these future scenarios are hard to conceptualize and measure precisely, but the general scope of potential change on both sides of the workforce B o o k R e v i e w s

Editor's report on the status of Health Care Management Review

Editor's report on the status of Health Care Management Review

Health Care Management Review

Health Care Management Review

Providing care at the end of life: do Medicare rules impede good care?

Providing care at the end of life: do Medicare rules impede good care?

The Use of LCA to Introduce Life-Cycle Thinking into Decision-Making for the Purchase of Medical Devices in the NHS

In the NHS, criteria for the selection and purchase of medical devices tend to be restricted to concerns about any risks to patients and/or staff during clinical practice, and the purchase price. In addition, the basis for taking many of these decisions about purchase may be only that of personal opinion, anecdote or limited information. We report on the application of life-cycle assessment (LCA) to a particular medical device — the suction receptacle — as a case-study to determine the potential of LCA to improve the range and quality of information available for decision-making, and act as a framework for a more holistic approach. Using LCA, substantial environmental and economic burdens were found to be associated with the different product systems in use (durable versus disposable devices). We discuss the ways in which various stakeholders in the healthcare sector could use this information, at both a strategic and operational level. We also outline possible future developments of LCA that would support healthcare managers in the drive towards evidence-based decision-making.

Multiple- Perspectives Model of Medical Technology

A model of medical technology is proposed, containing six different perspectives of its definition: physical, information, knowledge, process, change, and as an enabling and strategic resource. These perspectives are integrated to form an organizational dimension. The contributions of this model to better management of medical technology are described and its relation to other models in the literature is discussed.

Are Rural Hospitals “Strategic”?

This article focuses on strategic management of rural hospitals from an evolutionary perspective, using logistic regression models to examine the environmental/organizational pressures that induced rural hospitals to be more active in strategic changes (high changers versus low changers) in two 5-year consecutive intervals between 1983 and 1993. Findings suggest that these pressures had inconsistent effects and high changers were more sensitive to organizational pressures than environmental pressures.

The Evolving Role of Advanced Practice Nursing within the New Veteranʼs Health Administration

The Veteran's Health Administration (VHA) is experiencing profound change in focus and organization of service delivery. The focus of the evolving VHA system includes improvements in performance outcomes, such as actual costs, better access, higher levels of customer satisfaction, and improved functional status of patients. Given the changing nature of service delivery in the VHA system and the contributions of the Advanced Practices Nurses (APNs), this article explores the expanding role of the APN within the VHA and presents a best practice model for achieving the full potential of advanced nursing practice.

Identifying High-Users of Medical Care in a Farming-Dependent County

Health Care Management Review (HCMR) disseminates state-of-the-art knowledge about management, leadership, and administration of health care systems, organizations, and agencies. Multidisciplinary and international in scope, articles present completed research relevant to health care management, leadership, and administration, as well report on rigorous evaluations of health care management innovations, or provide a synthesis of prior research that results in evidence-based health care management practice recommendations. Articles are theory-driven and translate findings into implications and recommendations for health care administrators, researchers, and faculty. Annually, HCMR publishes the Best Theory to Practice paper chosen by the Health Care Administration Division of the Academy of Management.