Evidence-Based Management for Performance Improvement in HealthCare

Abstract

Evidence-based management for performance improvement in healthcare This special issue collects novel and relevant contributions that advance both the theory and practice of evidence-based management (EBMgt) for performance improvement in healthcare. All together the selected contributions shed new light on what we know so far about EBMgt in healthcare and they offer original insights to further the ongoing debate. Although the term "evidence-based management" (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006) is relatively new and not yet consolidated, the argument of informing management practice and decisions through the systematic use of different sources of evidence is not novel. Following the attention and popularity that evidence-based medicine (EBM) (Sackett et al., 1996) has received in healthcare over the last 20 years, scholars in different disciplines have progressively focused their research efforts to extend what has been learned from EBM to management (Arndt and Bigelow, 2009). This "gold-rush" has acquired momentum as a result of the increasing availability of very large bodies of data. In the specific context of healthcare, not only have serious concerns about the actual sustainability of the healthcare systems of the most developed countries reinforced the enthusiasm for EBMgt, but also the manifested challenge of implementing any change that "comes from the outside" in such a professional and knowledge-intensive socio-technical context. In this view, scholars of different disciplines, such as strategy, management, organization theory and design, operations and innovation management, public management, and operational research, have started an intense debate about how theories and practices about performance improvement developed thus far in product/manufacturing companies have to be rethought and extended when applied to service, professional, and knowledge-intensive organizations, such as hospitals (Wright et al., 2016). EBMgt has thus emerged as the preferable approach that connects many solutions that are currently under discussion. EBMgt asserts that managers should ground their judgment and practice on rational, transparent, and rigorous evidence that could help them explore and evaluate the pros and cons of alternatives and that they should be informed by relevant, robust academic research and literature reviews (Tranfield et al., 2003). Healthcare is among the sectors that might benefit more from such an approach. Evidence emerges in healthcare as the keystone for informing decision-making at all levels. At the micro level, evidence should solve frequent conflicts among physicians' different experiences and opinions about the most cost-effective and safe therapy for a group of patients. At the organizational level, hospitals managers should look at evidence as legitimization of the adoption of innovative health technologies that prove to be cost-effective and safe in other organizations, according to the well-established health technology assessment paradigm. Finally, at the macro level, policy-makers should in...

Identification of Health Expenditures Determinants: A Model to Manage the Economic Burden of Cardiovascular Disease

“…In conclusion, the findings of this study are of interest to the public healthcare sector, as economic evaluation is one of the most important components of studies focused on public health management. Public organizations of the health system fulfill a crucial role for the provision of public services to citizens [ 45 ]. The “public service” concept includes all goods and services that the public administration recognizes as being of social utility and therefore ensures their production, distribution, and supply to guarantee free use to the community [ 46 ].…”

Health system performance assessment in small countries: The case study of Latvia

“…Evidence‐based data collection refers to the need to inform decision makers through data and information based on real evidence. Evidence‐based management derives from evidence‐based medicine—ie, the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients—and it is based on the assumption that managers should ground their judgement and practice on rational, transparent, and rigorous evidence that could help them explore and evaluate the pros and cons of alternatives and that they should be informed by relevant, robust academic research and literature reviews . Evidence emerges in healthcare as the keystone for informing decision making at various levels.…”

“…Evidence-based management derives from evidence-based medicine-ie, the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients 34 -and it is based on the assumption that managers should ground their judgement and practice on rational, transparent, and rigorous evidence that could help them explore and evaluate the pros and cons of alternatives and that they should be informed by relevant, robust academic research and literature reviews. 35,36 Evidence emerges in healthcare as the keystone for informing decision making at various levels. At the micro level, evidence could support in solving frequent conflicts among physicians' different experiences and opinions about the most appropriate clinical practice to be adopted in certain cases.…”

Protocol: Value Stream Maping in Healthcare. A systematic literature review

“…Por un lado, simplificaremos quitando redundancias y usando operadores de proximidad (NEAR/WITHIN) o truncamiento (*). Por otro, incorporaremos sinónimos de otras revisiones (Aloini et al, 2018;Nowak et al, 2017;Reijula et al, 2014) para evitar falsos positivos.…”