Are MDs More Effective At Running Hospitals Than MBAs? [View All]

[HuckleB]

http://getbetterhealth.com/are-mds-more-effective-at-running-hospitals-than-mbas/2011.10.07#more-53216

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‘Social Science and Medicine’ published in its August issue a very interesting work by Amanda Godall, professor at the IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. Godall’s is the first empirical research on the correlation between hospital results and having MDs in their top managerial positions.
The work reviewed results from top 100 American hospitals in the areas of Cancer, Gastroenterology and Cardiovascular Disease. Godall used the Index of Hospital Quality, which takes into account several measures of infastructure, processes and results, and compared figures with the background of the board of directors that rule each hospital. In 2009, Gunderman & Kanter published in ‘Academic Medicine’ a study on 6,500 U.S. hospitals and found that only 235 were run by MDs.

Godall classed 300 hospital CEOs in two categories: professional managers with no clinical experience (often MBAs), and managers with a medical practice background. And she found a significant association between better IHQ results and having an MD running the hospital. As she points out, this doesn’t mean that people with a medical background are more effective managers. It could be that better hospitals tend to appoint MDs as CEOs, maybe as a way of improving carreer opportunities inside the organization.

Anyway, even if we need to acknowledge the limitations of this kind of research, Godall’s article is the first one to provide empirical data that not only open an interesting research field but also challenge HR policy in the healthcare sector. In public-funded healthcare systems with universal coverage such as the Spanish one, it also raises questions about Government policies over the last 30 years, in which it has been common practice to give important posts to people with no previous knowledge of the healthcare sector. The list of the latest Ministers of Health is the biggest proof: most of them, including current minister Leire Pajín, came to office without the slightest clue about the complexity inbuilt in healthcare management."



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Yet another layer to so many of the discussions at DU.