Nicholas Bloom, Carol Propper, Stephan Seiler and John Van Reenen, 2010
Published in the Review of Economic Studies

This paper looks at management measures from interviews of physicians and managers in public hospitals in the UK to look at their correlation to hospital performance, including both clinical and general operational/financial outcomes, and to examine the causal impact of competition on management quality.

Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen, 2017

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals that are closer to universities offering both medical education and business education have higher management quality, more MBA trained managers and lower mortality rates. This is true compared to the distance to universities that offer only business or medical education (or neither). We argue that supplying joint MBA-healthcare courses may be a channel through which universities increase medical business skills and raise clinical performance.

Nicholas Bloom, Carol Propper, Stephan Seiler and John Van Reenen, 2013

We collect data on management practices for operations, targets and human resources in 2,000 hospitals in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Sweden, UK and the US. These management practices are strongly associated with better clinical outcomes, such as heart attack survival rates, and financial outcomes like profits. We show that hospitals with more clinically trained managers, that are larger, that operate in more competitive markets, and that are not government owned appear to have significantly higher management scores. The US and UK have the highest average management scores, which we think may be due to relatively politically independent appointment of hospital leaders and stronger accountability mechanisms.