hospital performance and managerial education

Managerial Education and Management in Healthcare (2017). In this article Nicholas Bloom et al investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in 2000 hospitals across nine countries.

They document:

• A large variation of management practices within each country
• The index “better management” is positively associated with improved clinical outcomes such as survival rates from AMI.
• There's evidence that a hospital’s proximity to a university which supplies joint business and clinical education is associated with a higher management practice score (and better clinical outcomes).
• The bundle of managerial and clinical skills has an impact on hospital management quality.
• Management matters for hospital performance and that the supply of managerial human capital may be a way of improving hospital productivity.
• Given the enormous pressure health systems are under, this may be a complementary way of dealing with health demands in addition to the usual recipe of greater medical inputs.

The correlations they describe are only suggestive as they do not have panel data or experimental evidence to track out causal impacts. Such evidence from either randomized control trials or natural experiments is an obvious next step in their agenda.

painting: Blue star (2016)

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