Editorial: Delivering effective healthcare at lower cost: Introduction to the special issue

• Author: Jeffery S. Smith,Lawrence D. Fredendall
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1078
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020

EDITORIAL

Editorial: Delivering effective healthcare at lower cost:

Introduction to the special issue

1|HEALTHCARE IN

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

The healthcare industry represents a substantial portion

of worldwide economic and social activities and initia-

tives and employs many people around the globe. The

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Develop-

ment (OECD) estimates that its member countries spend

over 8% of gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare.

The United States spends almost 18% of GDP and is pro-

jected to move closer to 20% in the near future

(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Develop-

ment, 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) has

estimated that there are over 59 million workers in the

healthcare arena, while the Centers for Disease Control

(CDC) has reported that the United States alone has over

18 million (Centers for Disease Control, 2018; World

Health Organization, 2019).

Research about health-related problems by operations-

management (OM) scholars is increasing: The Journal of

Operations Management (JOOM) has published 22 papers

on this topic (not including these in this special issue)

since 2015. One reason research by OM scholars about

healthcare processes has rapidly increased is the open

access to rich data sets that enable investigations on

core operational issues. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and

Medicaid Services (CMS) have collected and made avail-

able volumes of data (e.g., Ding, 2013; Dobrzykowski,

McFadden, & Vonderembse, 2016; Senot, Chandrasekaran, &

Ward, 2016), enabling OM researchers to partner with medi-

cal professionals to examine pressing,realworld,operational

issues in healthcare.

2|SPECIAL ISSUE PROCESS AND

PAPERS

The editorial team, led by Lawrence Fredendall and Jeff

Smith and assisted by Healthcare department co-editors

Anand Nair and Anita Tucker, considered papers about

any aspect of healthcare delivery and using any method-

ology as long as the paper maintained JOOM's empirical

focus. In all, we received 73 submissions to the special

issue. Each was evaluated by teams of knowledgeable

individuals.

1

At the end of this process, 11 papers were

accepted for the SI.

The 11 SI papers are outlined in detail in Tables 1 and

2. The papers are presented in two broad groups—

operational and strategic—based on their level of investi-

gation. These 11 articles use a wide range of operational

and outcome data to address multiple aspects of the

healthcare environment. Two papers (Catena, Dopson, &

Holweg, 2020; Lee, Venkataraman, Heim, Roth, &

Chilingerian, 2020) examine how operational policies set

by a national health system affect the delivery of

healthcare. Two papers (Ding, Peng, Heim, & Jordan,

2020 and Mishra, Salzarulo, & Modi, 2020) examine how

strategic approaches taken by hospitals, possibly in

response to national health-system policies, affect the

delivery of healthcare in those hospitals. Two papers

describe hospital-emergency-department operations

(Berry Jaeker & Tucker, 2020; Davis, Zobel, Khansa, &

Glick, 2020). Two papers (Dreyfus, Nair, & Rosales, 2020;

Mukherjee & Sinha, 2020) examine perioperative ser-

vices. Two papers examine operations at the level of the

entire hospital (Johnson, Burgess, & Sethi, 2020; Tucker,

Zheng, Gardner, & Bohn, 2020). In addition, two papers

(Mukherjee & Sinha, 2020; Stevens & van Schaik, 2020)

use the lens of new-technology implementation to exam-

ine how technology affects care delivery. Tables 1 and 2

also reveal the variety of methods employed. Seven

papers analyze secondary data, two use observational

studies, one is an ethnographic study, one a case study,

one collects and analyzes survey data, and one applies a

design-science methodology.

2.1 |Operational-level articles

Six papers examine traditional OM topics related to

healthcare at the operational level. Three papers examine

aspects of process design, two examine the operation of

the system, and one examines how learning occurs, while

implementing a new technology. In the first paper, “The

value of process friction: The role of justification in

reducing medical costs,”Berry Jaeker and Tucker (2020)

Received: 14 December 2019 Accepted: 16 December 2019

DOI: 10.1002/joom.1078

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