The research group Hospital Structures, Processes, and Operations investigates research questions at several levels of the hospital system: (1) The sector level, and (2) the organizational/ management level. With our research, we strive to find policies for the optimal design of the hospital system, namely policies that contribute to the improvement of hospital quality and profitability while containing healthcare expenditure increases.
Our research regarding Hospital Structures addresses the hospital sector level and encompasses hospital capacity and service mandate planning, hospital quality competition, public reporting of hospital quality information, patients’ hospital choice and hospital payment systems.
When investigating Hospital Processes, we are interested in research questions such as the (causal) relationship between process quality, process digitalization, and hospital profitability, or clinical guideline adherence.
Optimizing Hospital Operations in terms of quality of care is currently emerging as a new major research topic for our group. This research is concerned with the organizational/ management level of the hospital sector. For instance, we are investigating whether optimizing clinical decisions such as the discharge of intensive care unit (ICU) patients can reduce readmissions to the ICU, resolving process bottlenecks.
In our research, we focus on quantitative methods such as machine learning techniques from the class of doubly-robust learners (e.g., causal forest), (offline) policy learners (e.g., policy tree) or binary classifiers (e.g., positive and unlabeled data learners). Besides, we develop conceptual frameworks, e.g., for health policy refinement, and compile scientific reports.
The research group is led by Dr. Justus Vogel. For our research, we often rely on strong partnerships with large hospitals. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us in case of questions: justus.vogel@unisg.ch