Media Coverage

Hospitals can seem like confusing, chaotic places for patients, even when the employees are following well-established protocols and resource management techniques. But there is always room for improvement. That’s the goal behind the research of Hummy Song, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, who focuses on improving the performance of health care delivery systems.

In the wake of the two most recent and tragic mass killings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the news cycle has brought with it no small amount of speculation that mass killings are on the rise and that one attack tends to inspire a copycat. While these assumptions are understandable, the data simply does not support them.

Should hospital advertising be banned? A few policymakers in Washington, D.C., have recently considered such an action based on a long-standing debate on whether it poses the spread of misinformation, and that it is not an effective or responsible use of an already limited healthcare budget. New research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science studies the impact of a ban on hospital advertising, and whether those fears are justified.

Hospitals no longer have those open wards of the ’40s and ’50s, but the idea of keeping similar types of patients together persists. A new study asks an age-old question, does location matter? Spoiler alert – yes.

Within any large organization, some employee teams always perform better than others—but the reasons are often murky. In 2010 then doctoral student Ben Waber embedded himself in the offices of Travelco, an online travel agency, to figure out what factors make a team productive. He noted that all the employees worked in the same headquarters, sat in the same meeting rooms, and enjoyed the same snacks and Foosball tables. But when he observed certain interactions among them, he says, “there was something really weird”: he saw members of the most effective teams tended to eat in groups of 12, while employees from lower-performing teams usually ate in groups of four.