Health Care

Building on eight years of experience with executive health care management experience and outstanding research in health care economics, CIBRE researchers address several key areas in health care management, including preventive care, patient care through sharing of patient information and best practice knowledge, and distributed and on-demand patient care.

Improving Social Capital for a Health Revolution: Economics Professor Sherman Folland recently received a $600,000 research grant from the Norwegian Research Council to study Social Capital (SC) in Bergen, Norway over the next three summers. SC is the value of a culture’s social connectedness, measured by attributes such as the quality and quantity of social interactions, and levels of trust and caring for others. As a country, Norway ranks among the highest in SC while the U.S., currently in the middle of the pack, suffers from declining SC. Specifically, Folland asks the question: “Does social capital contribute to less health-risky behaviors?” Folland’s preliminary findings, published in the Health Economic journal, indicates that smoking, excessive drinking and overeating tend to diminish when a person has a strong social network.

For more information, contact Folland at (248) 370-4086 or folland@oakland.edu.

Health Care Virtual Communities: Balaji Rajagopalan, associate professor, MIS, and graduate research assistant Dean J Przymusinski are developing a framework for identifying the mechanisms by which certain system design features add value to health care virtual communities. The proposed framework draws upon theories in social psychology to identify what behaviors specific design features will likely elicit from health care virtual community participants.  Using this framework, systems developers will be able to leverage valuable insights into which design features will best support a virtual community's objectives and deliver the greatest value to users.

For more information, contact Rajagopalan at (248) 370-4958 or rajagopa@oakland.edu.

Diffusion of Open Source Software for Health Care: Balaji Rajagopalan, associate professor, MI, along with Ashutosh Deshmukh, Penn State University, Erie, and Hemangini Deshmukh, Mercy Hurst College, are studying how lead adopters of health care related open source software play a critical role in the diffusion process.

For more information, contact Rajagopalan at (248) 370-4958 or rajagopa@oakland.edu.

Access and Discrimination: Economics Professor Miron Stano’s current research deals with access and discrimination in health care. The challenge to scholars is to distinguish between the effects of discrimination and other factors, such as patient preferences, severity of disease and insurance coverage, on utilization. 

An ongoing project with Rajiv Shrama and Renu Gehring takes advantage of a natural experiment, the weekend closure of many outpatient facilities, to examine racial differences in access to non-emergency health care. The methodology introduced in the study overcomes the need to control for those other factors. Preliminary analyses of the rates of hospital admission through the emergency on weekends and weekdays finds evidence that Blacks with asthma have poorer non-emergency department access than Whites.

In the Summer 2008 issue of The Rand Journal of Economics, Stano and colleagues also developed methods that require only widely available administrative data to detect discrimination in hospital admission and discharge decisions between privately insured and Medicaid patients.  The study showed that patients are dismissed earlier on days when hospitals face high demand but there was no evidence of either discriminatory admission or discharge behavior. More information about the study is available at: http://blackwellpublishing.com/press/pressitem.asp?ref=1895 

For more information, contact Stano at (248) 370-3291 or stano@oakland.edu.

Research and Decision Support: Associate Professor, MIS, Mark Isken has several health care related projects underway:

• Development of an optimization model based decision support system for assessing the impact of procedure scheduling policies on hospital inpatient occupancy variability. This decision support tool will be web based and available to the healthcare community as free and open source models and software. Summer 2009, in the next phase of this project, Isken will work on a suite of hospital census forecasting models.
• Extending several staff scheduling models he previously developed to address nurse staffing challenges in hospital obstetrical units. The scheduling models are available as free and open source models and software. Both of these models are being tested Winter 2009 at a large teaching hospital.
• Development of simulation tools and models for health care related systems, including a Java-based framework for simulating patient flow in hospitals. This framework was successfully used in the development of a large scale simulation model for hospital based pneumatic tube systems.

More information, including a list of relevant publications and links to software can be found at Isken’s Web site - http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/isken/ and see the Research and Development menu.

For more information, contact Isken at (248) 370-3296 or isken@oakland.edu.