Projects: Healthcare Management Analytics Lab

Successful surgeries require teamwork and experienced team members. In a high stress environment, nurses, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and other medical professionals must coordinate their efforts toward successful surgical outcomes. Yet the norm in medical institutions around the U.S. is for these teams to rarely work together from procedure to procedure. Not only does this have a detrimental effect on team familiarity, but it also makes it difficult for nurses to maintain consistent exposure to their surgical specialty (e.g., neurosurgery) and to develop their skillset across specialties. This lack of consistency in team structure may have grave consequences, and research indicates that notable surgical failures are occasionally due to inconsistent teaming.

In the first phase of the project, students will use extensive data from the University of Chicago Medical Center to estimate the procedure outcomes (e.g., completion time) using different predictors; in order to do so, they will conduct a comparative regression study. The second phase entails assessing the current degree of surgical team familiarity. The students will predict the impact of teaming and nurse experience on surgical performance. They will estimate the improvement in efficiency that can be attained by keeping teams intact and assigning nurses to their top specialties. The participants will then present their findings to the executives of The University of Chicago Medical Center.