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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  Dignity Health: A Portfolio of Improvement Projects

  Anita L. Tucker and Lydia Ypsse Kim

  Citation:

  Tucker, Anita L., and Lydia Ypsse Kim. "Dignity Health: A Portfolio of Improvement Projects." Harvard Business School Case 613-092, April 2013.

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2013

  The Impact of Pooling on Throughput Time in Discretionary Work Settings: An Empirical Investigation of Emergency Department Length of Stay

  Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker and Karen L. Murrell

  We conduct an empirical investigation on the impact of pooling tasks and resources on throughput times in a discretionary work setting. We use an Emergency Department's (ED) patient-level data (N = 234,334) from 2007 to 2010 to test our hypotheses. We find that when the ED's work system had pooled tasks and resources, patients' lengths of stay were longer than when the ED converted to having dedicated tasks and resources. More specifically, we find that dedicated systems resulted in a 9% overall decrease in length of stay, which corresponds to a 25-minute reduction in length of stay for an average patient of medium severity in this ED. We propose that the improved performance comes from a reduction in social loafing and a more distributed utilization of shared resources. These benefits outweigh the expected efficiency gains from pooling, which are commonly predicted by queuing theory.

  Keywords: pooling; discretionary work; social loafing; shared resources; empirical operations;

  Citation:

  Song, Hummy, Anita L. Tucker, and Karen L. Murrell. "The Impact of Pooling on Throughput Time in Discretionary Work Settings: An Empirical Investigation of Emergency Department Length of Stay." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 13–079, March 2013.

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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Video Supplement 2012

  Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson

  Keywords: process improvement; leadership succession; healthcare; quality and safety; transparency;

  Citation:

  Tucker, Anita, and Amy Edmondson. "Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Video Supplement 2012." Harvard Business School Video Supplement 613-710, February 2013.

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