16 Oct 2017Working Paper Summaries

Healthy Business? Managerial Education and Management in Healthcare

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

A hospital's proximity to a university supplying both business and clinical education is associated with higher management practice scores and better clinical outcomes.

Author Abstract

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.