Productivity Models in Non-hospital Settings

Productivity Models in Non-hospital Settings

Question description

Part 1 of Productivity Models in Non-hospital Settings: Using the information starting on page 408 of your text book, describe how to improve productivity in non-hospital organizations e.g. American Heart Association, Lupus Foundation, Alzheimer’s Association etc. What are the differences in applying the model to the non-hospital setting? Are there any special challenges in the non-hospital setting? Respond to at least two of your classmates’ postings.

This Discussion asks you to use the information starting on page 408 of your text book, describe how to improve productivity in non-hospital organizations e.g. American Heart Association, Lupus Foundation, Alzheimer’s Association etc. Please use the following seven steps written on page 409 of your text book to discuss.

1. Management orientation;
2. Overview studies;
3. Productivity reporting;
4. Quality control;
5. In-depth studies;
6. Performance/reward systems, and;
7. Monitoring, review, and change

Important information for writing discussion questions and participation

Welcome to class

Hello class and welcome to the class and I will be your instructor for this course. This is a -week course and requires a lot of time commitment, organization, and a high level of dedication. Please use the class syllabus to guide you through all the assignments required for the course. I have also attached the classroom policies to this announcement to know your expectations for this course. Please review this document carefully and ask me any questions if you do. You could email me at any time or send me a message via the “message” icon in halo if you need to contact me. I check my email regularly, so you should get a response within 24 hours. If you have not heard from me within 24 hours and need to contact me urgently, please send a follow up text to

I strongly encourage that you do not wait until the very last minute to complete your assignments. Your assignments in weeks 4 and 5 require early planning as you would need to present a teaching plan and interview a community health provider. I advise you look at the requirements for these assignments at the beginning of the course and plan accordingly. I have posted the YouTube link that explains all the class assignments in detail. It is required that you watch this 32-minute video as the assignments from week 3 through 5 require that you follow the instructions to the letter to succeed. Failure to complete these assignments according to instructions might lead to a zero. After watching the video, please schedule a one-on-one with me to discuss your topic for your project by the second week of class. Use this link to schedule a 15-minute session. Please, call me at the time of your appointment on my number. Please note that I will NOT call you.

Please, be advised I do NOT accept any assignments by email. If you are having technical issues with uploading an assignment, contact the technical department and inform me of the issue. If you have any issues that would prevent you from getting your assignments to me by the deadline, please inform me to request a possible extension. Note that working fulltime or overtime is no excuse for late assignments. There is a 5%-point deduction for every day your assignment is late. This only applies to approved extensions. Late assignments will not be accepted.

If you think you would be needing accommodations due to any reasons, please contact the appropriate department to request accommodations.

Plagiarism is highly prohibited. Please ensure you are citing your sources correctly using APA 7th edition. All assignments including discussion posts should be formatted in APA with the appropriate spacing, font, margin, and indents. Any papers not well formatted would be returned back to you, hence, I advise you review APA formatting style. I have attached a sample paper in APA format and will also post sample discussion responses in subsequent announcements.

Your initial discussion post should be a minimum of 200 words and response posts should be a minimum of 150 words. Be advised that I grade based on quality and not necessarily the number of words you post. A minimum of TWO references should be used for your initial post. For your response post, you do not need references as personal experiences would count as response posts. If you however cite anything from the literature for your response post, it is required that you cite your reference. You should include a minimum of THREE references for papers in this course. Please note that references should be no more than 5 years old except recommended as a resource for the class. Furthermore, for each discussion board question, you need ONE initial substantive response and TWO substantive responses to either your classmates or your instructor for a total of THREE responses. There are TWO discussion questions each week, hence, you need a total minimum of SIX discussion posts for each week. I usually post a discussion question each week. You could also respond to these as it would count towards your required SIX discussion posts for the week.

I understand this is a lot of information to cover in 5 weeks, however, the Bible says in Philippians 4:13 that we can do all things through Christ that strengthens us. Even in times like this, we are encouraged by God’s word that we have that ability in us to succeed with His strength. I pray that each and every one of you receives strength for this course and life generally as we navigate through this pandemic that is shaking our world today. Relax and enjoy the course!

Hi Class,

Please read through the following information on writing a Discussion question response and participation posts.

Contact me if you have any questions.

Important information on Writing a Discussion Question

• Your response needs to be a minimum of 150 words (not including your list of references)
• There needs to be at least TWO references with ONE being a peer reviewed professional journal article.
• Include in-text citations in your response
• Do not include quotes—instead summarize and paraphrase the information
• Follow APA-7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed

Participation –replies to your classmates or instructor

• A minimum of 6 responses per week, on at least 3 days of the week.
• Each response needs at least ONE reference with citations—best if it is a peer reviewed journal article
• Each response needs to be at least 75 words in length (does not include your list of references)
• Responses need to be substantive by bringing information to the discussion or further enhance the discussion. Responses of “I agree” or “great post” does not count for the word count.
• Follow APA 7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed

• Remember to use and follow APA-7th edition for all weekly assignments, discussion questions, and participation points.
• Here are some helpful links
• The is a great resource

Don’t forget to answer the following two questions:

What are the differences in applying the model to the non-hospital setting (e.g. American Heart Association, Lupus Foundation, Alzheimer’s Association)?

Are there any special challenges (regarding applying this model) in the non-hospital setting (e.g. American Heart Association, Lupus Foundation, Alzheimer’s Association)?

Are there any special challenges in the non-hospital setting?

Part 2

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a Cause and Effect Diagram and Pareto Analysis in terms of analyzing quality issues?

In the literature on hospital performance, increasing attention has been paid to the fact that hospital production activity could be

influenced by factors other than merely outputs and inputs. Thus, hospitals’ characteristics and elements inherent to the environment where units operate in–e.g., hospital complexity, teaching status, degree of specialization, etc.—may affect their costs and performance [1]. As performance measures can be regarded as success indicators [2], accounting for the effects of these hospital cost heterogeneity factors turns out to be crucial to avoid misleading conclusions that may affect policies designed to improve hospital productive processes.

Hospital performance has been commonly approached through productivity measurements. Indeed, the need to obtain productivity measurements in a multiple-input and multiple-output context, such as that of hospitals, has given rise to the concept of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index. This index measures the performance of a unit by the quotient of an aggregated measure of the outputs produced relative to an aggregated measure of the inputs used. Moreover, the TFP index accounts for other factors that may influence productivity, such as the scale in which units operate, i.e., economies of scale—or investments in technology and organizational adjustments, i.e., technical change. Therefore, the TFP index provides more comprehensive information on both hospitals’ cost structure and performance than just efficiency measurements [3].

In addition to efficiency, frontier methods can provide productivity measurements. Thus, TFP indexes can also be derived by obtaining a frontier of reference using either non-parametric or parametric techniques [4]. Although approaches using parametric methods and measurements and decomposition of productivity have been developed in the literature on performance measurements [5–6], the majority of applications to hospital productivity have employed non-parametric methods to obtain the frontier, and thus have addressed the construction of a productivity index based on the Malmquist Index [7–10].

Hospital cost heterogeneity has been extensively considered in frontier analyses on hospital performance. However, although there is little evidence of measurement bias caused in hospital efficiency indexes by the omission of these factors, we are not aware of any previous study measuring the bias in hospital productivity levels. The premise is that hospitals operating in relatively more adverse conditions will be located at a greater distance from the benchmark frontier, appearing to be more inefficient. In other words, not accounting for elements of heterogeneity in costs is likely to give rise to higher inefficiency values [11] and, in turn, to lower productivity values. In addition, heterogeneity factors could also affect the use of technology and scale of operations. Thus, these elements may also influence hospital productivity via their impact on its components of technical change and scale economies.

Considering all the above, the main objective of this research is to estimate -in the context of Spanish public general hospitals- the bias that the omission of hospital cost heterogeneity may cause in measurements of hospital productivity as well as in each of its components. The Spanish public health system is a national health system (SNHS) characterised by universal coverage and tax funding. In addition, the SNHS is decentralised in such a way that all 17 Spanish regions (Autonomous Communities) have the responsibility to manage, regulate and plan the provision of health care services for their respective populations, leaving basically the coordination tasks to the central government. This decentralisation took more than 20 years: from 1981, when Cataluña took over the management of its health care system, to 2002, when the health services were devolved to the last ten Autonomous Communities depending on the central government. Based on hospital data from the SNHS, a stochastic cost frontier is estimated following parametric techniques to derive measures of hospital cost efficiency and productivity. This constitutes an adequate methodology for the purposes of this study as: (1) it enables to test hypotheses on the existence of hospital cost heterogeneity and (2) it allows the separation of effects related to random shocks from inefficiency, and by extension, from productivity measures.

The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 provides a review of how previous literature on hospital performance has accounted for the effects of hospital cost heterogeneity. In section 3, the methodology followed, as well as the description of the variables used, are outlined. Results of the analysis are reported in section 4, whereas these are discussed in section 5 that includes the concluding remarks.