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Please find below a selection of recent articles and commentary by Rotman faculty, each focusing on a different management challenge in the sector.
Review more Healthcare and Life Sciences topics on Rotman Insights Hub.
"The Promises and Challenges of Value Based Care and Bundled Reimbursements in Single-Payer Health Systems"Single-payer health systems seem especially well-suited for value-based, bundled payment initiatives. An attempt to create a bundled payment system for wound care in the Canadian province of Ontario demonstrates the features of single-payer systems that support such initiatives and those that put them at a disadvantage.
“Large-scale implementation of rapid antigen testing system for COVID-19 in workplaces”The findings describe a sustained and scalable implementation plan for establishing a frequent workplace COVID-19 testing program. High-frequency testing programs offer the potential to break chains of transmission and act as an extra layer of protection in a comprehensive public health response.
"The Way We Make Each Other Feel: Relational Affect and Joint Task Performance"This study suggests that the emotions two coworkers experience when they work together might be more sensitive to joint experiences of success than failure. This is especially remarkable in a context like surgery, where error-free execution is so important.
“Health knowledge and non-pharmaceutical interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa”Providing health information is a non-pharmaceutical intervention designed to reduce disease transmission and infection risk by encouraging behavior change. But does knowledge change behavior?
"Threshold-Based Allocation Policies for Inventory Management of Red Blood Cells”Under current regulations, red blood cell (RBC) units can be transfused to patients up to 42 days after donation. However, recent studies suggest an association between the age of transfused RBCs and adverse clinical outcomes for their recipients.
“Resilience in Action: leading for resilience in response to COVID-19”Resilience matters now more than ever in healthcare, with the COVID-19 pandemic putting healthcare providers and systems under unprecedented strain.
"Lab safety and research productivity are not at odds" This article highlights systemic issues related to laboratory safety and how placing more safety requirements in research settings does not lower output.
“Study Examines the most effective COVID-19 control policies”Which COVID policies are most effective? A new study examines the effectiveness of COVID-19 control policies in 40 jurisdictions including countries and U.S. states.
“Working in a Pandemic: Exploring the Impact of COVID19 Health Anxiety on Work, Family, and Health Outcomes”In this study, the authors integrate transactional stress theory (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) with self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) to advance and test a model predicting that CovH anxiety prompts individuals to suppress emotions, which has detrimental implications for their psychological need fulfillment.
"On the Impact of Treatment Restrictions for the Indigent Suffering from a Chronic Disease: The Case of Compassionate Dialysis"We analyze a congested healthcare delivery setting resulting from emergency treatment of a chronic disease on a regular basis. Our quantitative results demonstrate that the thinking behind the mandatory protocol is potentially naive.
“Lockdowns and Innovation: Evidence from the 1918 Flu Pandemic”Does social distancing harm innovation? This article estimates the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—policies that restrict interactions to slow the spread of disease—on local invention.
"The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19"Why solving the information problem should be at the core of our pandemic response: essential reading about the long-term implications of our current crisis.
“Stocks, Flows, and Risk Response to Pandemic Data”In this study, the authors highlight a critical aspect of pandemic data that changes how lay people reason about it. Specifically, pandemic data—like much time-series data—can be presented as either as stocks (the total number of cases) or flows (the number of new cases). The choice of how the same data is presented can shift judgments of risk and behavioral intentions.
"How Can a Population Health Approach Be Both Useful and Credible?"As researchers consider tackling factors affecting public health only in indirect or distant ways, great care must be taken to retain both the benefits of field expertise and the public credibility of the field.
“Dynamic Scheduling of Home Health Care Patients to Medical Providers”Home care provides personalized medical care and social support to patients within their own home. Our work proposes a dynamic scheduling framework to assist in the assignment of patients to health practitioners (HPs) at a single home care agency.
“Capacitated SIR Model with an Application to COVID-19”The classical SIR model and its variants have seen great success in understanding and predicting infectious diseases' spread. We extend the SIR model to incorporate the limited testing capacity, which is one of the most notable challenges in the current COVID-19 outbreak.
“Online Care Expansion and Patient Access: Evidence from Talk Therapists”Using data from a search portal for mental health care services, this paper evaluates how an exogenous expansion in the number of online competitors in a market affects local providers of psychotherapy.
“Care Coordination for Healthcare Referrals under a Shared-Savings Program”We study under what conditions a coordinated referral network operating under a shared savings program can improve health outcomes for patients, and financial outcomes for the payer, hospitals and providers.
“Quali health: creating access to quality healthcare for South Africa’s excluded majority”For discussion of social entrepreneurship in middle-income economies, emerging markets generally and Africa, specifically, Quali Health presents interesting questions about entrepreneurial funding, scaling and the interplay between social entrepreneurial activities and the informal sector.