The current state of outpatient healthcare delivery is characterized by capacity shortages and long waits for appointments. Yet a substantial fraction of valuable doctors’ capacity is wasted due to no-shows. In this paper, we examine the effect of wait to appointment on patient flow,...

This paper examines the effect of multitasking on overall worker performance, as measured by processing time, throughput rate, and output quality using micro-level operational data from the field. Specifically, we study the multitasking behavior of physicians in a busy hospital emergency...

One key driver of improvement in surgical outcomes is a surgeon’s prior experience. However, research notes that not all experience provides equal value for performance. How then should surgeons accumulate experience to improve quality outcomes? In this paper we investigate the differential...

We use hospital level discharge data from cardiac patients in California to estimate the effects of focus on operational performance. We examine focus at three distinct levels of the organization – at the firm level, at the operating unit level, and at the process flow level. We find that...

Much of prior work in the area of service operations management has assumed service rates to be exogenous to the level of load on the system. Using operational data from patient transport services and cardiothoracic surgery – two vastly different healthcare delivery services – we show that...

We examine the published empirical literature in healthcare operations management over the last 20 years. We note several unique characteristics of the research in healthcare operations, including a focus on operational and organizational variables, an interest in the underlying mechanisms that...

This paper studies heuristic thinking and cognitive bias using a natural experiment from the field. The setting for the study is a set of acute care hospitals, where we examine the care process and discharge decisions for individual patients. Determining a patient’s suitability for discharge...