Research Paper for Yale SOM course MGT 879 Spring 2021 (Professor Pinker) Instructions: Choose one of the provided topics or propose one of your own by Friday April 2nd. Paper is due the last day of class May 4th. 8-10 pages dbl spaced (not including references). Individual assignment. Standards: Basic expectation that papers are grammatically correct and coherently written. Claims made in the paper have to be backed up with references to reputable sources and data. Some sources have to be from academic literature, cannot just rely on the popular press. This can also be more journalistic where you interview experts and people involved in some activity or situation (examples are in the topic list). Topics • Telemedicine in primary care: What is the impact of telemedicine on the delivery of primary care? There are several perspectives to take here and you don’t have to address all of them in detail. 1) How does telemedicine change the care delivery process? What needs to be done differently in a physician’s practice? 2) How is the health of patients impacted by TM? 3) What is the extent of the adoption of telemedicine? I.e. how many people are impacted by it and what kind of people (demographically, geographically…)? 4) What is influencing the adoption of TM and what obstacles remain to wider adoption? 5) What direction is the technology heading? • Telemedicine in specialist care: See above comments on TM in primary care for some guidance, but also pay attention to the following: 1) What specialties are best suited to TM given the current technology and how might this change in the future? 2) How does TM impact access to specialties? • Covid19 Vaccine distribution: Analyze different ways the various vaccines for Covid-19 are being distributed. This can be focused on the US looking at differences among states or across countries. Try to give attention to some of the details of the process of getting a vaccine into a person and identify the challenges that can come up. Use an operations perspective to identify principles for delivering mass vaccination quickly and efficiently. Make sure to define what you think the most important performance criteria for vaccine distribution are. • National stockpiles of medical equipment: During the Covid pandemic many deficiencies in the national stockpiles for important medical equipment came to light. Report on what kinds of equipment are typically stockpiled. Using some specific example(s) analyze what the factors involved in determining if there is adequate supply being sure to define carefully what performance measures are most important. For the examples you focus on what policy recommendations can you make to improve performance in the future? • Redesign of healthcare delivery spaces to take into account changes brought by Covid: Delivering care during the Covid-19 pandemic has required healthcare providers to use their facilities differently to prevent infections among patients seeking care and the staff serving them. These adjustments were made to existing facilities on the fly. Looking ahead try to address what guidelines might continue into the future and how healthcare delivery spaces might be redesigned to better fit those new realities.• Vaccine supply chain: Vaccines for Covid-19 were developed incredibly rapidly by most standards there is at the same time a long road ahead until most of the world’s population is vaccinated and there is a lot of variability across countries in terms of the vaccine distribution. Analyze the vaccine supply chain from development to distribution and explain the factors that have been facilitating and hindering it. Think about what delays were avoidable and which ones are inevitable. • Follow-up on pediatric vaccination program in CT: Report on the Connecticut childhood vaccination program described in the Children’s Premier case study. Take the format of an in-depth newspaper or magazine article and interview state health department officials and pediatricians to explain how the program works and what it has achieved from the perspective of the relevant parties. • Access to care in the VA: Delays veterans have faced in getting care through the VA system has drawn a lot of attention over the last several years. This has led to many leadership changes at the VA and a variety of policy changes about how veterans get access to care. Report on what has happened on this front in the VA over the last 5-years and what lessons have been learned. • Access to care in rural areas: Access to healthcare in the US varies greatly by region of the country. Even across rural areas there are great disparities. Report on the state of access to healthcare in rural areas giving attention to identifying the specific types of care/services that are limited and what factors are driving these limitations. Identify some innovations that appear to have promise in addressing the shortcomings. Focus on operational issues. • Access to care in urban areas: Urban centers in the US typically have high concentrations of hospitals and are often the locations of the highest level of medical services. Yet, within these urban areas there are populations that face obstacles to accessing care. Report on the factors limiting access to healthcare in urban centers giving attention to identifying the specific types of care/services that are limited. Identify some innovations that appear to have promise in addressing the shortcomings. Focus on operational issues. • Impact of medical training on productivity or quality in hospitals: Academic medical centers have a responsibility to serve as a training ground for new physicians. This creates additional operational challenges for the efficient delivery of care. Using specific examples, take an in-depth look at care delivery processes and how they are impacted by trainees. • Moving to 24/7 operations in healthcare: Healthcare services of all kinds are less available at night and on the weekends, and yet people get sick around the clock. Physical facilities and equipment have a large fixed cost and there are financial benefits to operating them at a high utilization. Lighter operations on weekends, say, will reduce facility utilization. Analyze the tradeoffs involved in moving toward more 24/7 like operations in hospitals. What are the costs and benefits? • Use of decision support systems in clinical care. Advances in data collection and analysis methods have fueled increasing efforts to use computer algorithms to guide care decisions and make diagnoses. Report on what considerations are most important in determining whether a particular computer based tool is useful/useable in the medical setting. What are application areas in which these tools seem to be most promising, explain what benefit they are bringing?
